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The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II
During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe. Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 9, 2011
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161 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 2, 2012
I think that while this book presents an excellent look at the children of Europe during and after World War II, there's no real flow to it as a whole. It reads like a series of essays or research papers on the various pieces of the puzzle in relation to children, with one chapter focusing on the Czech Republic while another focuses on the products of French and German mingling. There's very little clean segue between chapters. At the same time, however, the theses Zahra posits and her research findings are all incredibly interesting, with many personal stories and examples woven through. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of facts and numbers, but the primary source material makes that more bland aspect easier to swallow.
November 3, 2014
This book, by a recent MacArthur grant winner, is more readable than I expected but still not something I'd actively recommend to anyone who isn't in the habit of reading academic-press books.
The author explores the myriad ways children were shuttled around after the end of World War II. Sometimes this was organized around emerging principles of what was best for children. Often it was at the behest of governments trying to boost their population (and with the most moldable and ethnically "superior" children--those bad ideas didn't die out overnight), or nationalists trying to expel the tainted children of supposed collaborators, or meddlesome Allies trying to rescue children from Soviet-influenced Communist proto-states in Eastern Europe, even if that's where the children's parents happened to be. She cites surprising examples where the child's own desires conflicted with social workers' plans for him, or where parents willingly relinquished children to what they hoped was a better life. Zahra shows how some of our ideas about child welfare and family framework date from this period and makes the point that debates over the children's fate exemplify the politics of that confusing and conflicted time.
I read this book primarily for background information and found it well-organized and useful. If you were reading it for touching anecdotes, you'd find a fair few well-chosen ones but the book would be too dry for you. If, for some reason, you wanted academic jargon and theory, you might be disappointed because I found the whole book perfectly clear, even though the author is advancing some sophisticated arguments.
The author explores the myriad ways children were shuttled around after the end of World War II. Sometimes this was organized around emerging principles of what was best for children. Often it was at the behest of governments trying to boost their population (and with the most moldable and ethnically "superior" children--those bad ideas didn't die out overnight), or nationalists trying to expel the tainted children of supposed collaborators, or meddlesome Allies trying to rescue children from Soviet-influenced Communist proto-states in Eastern Europe, even if that's where the children's parents happened to be. She cites surprising examples where the child's own desires conflicted with social workers' plans for him, or where parents willingly relinquished children to what they hoped was a better life. Zahra shows how some of our ideas about child welfare and family framework date from this period and makes the point that debates over the children's fate exemplify the politics of that confusing and conflicted time.
I read this book primarily for background information and found it well-organized and useful. If you were reading it for touching anecdotes, you'd find a fair few well-chosen ones but the book would be too dry for you. If, for some reason, you wanted academic jargon and theory, you might be disappointed because I found the whole book perfectly clear, even though the author is advancing some sophisticated arguments.
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June 21, 2011NO SOONER HAD I finished this fascinating book than I remembered the shattering scene in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française when the teenage orphans whom a fatherly priest has been shepherding to the safety of a secluded chateau suddenly turn on him like a pack of wolves and stone him to death. It is an unforgettable moment that seems to sum up all the madness of France’s panic in the summer of 1940. Read more...
February 23, 2021
A quick read. The subject matter is 5 stars.
I’m saddened, but not surprised that Jewish people & other persecuted segments targeted by the Nazi regime were forced to resort to such horrid living conditions in order to survive.
I’m saddened, but not surprised that Jewish people & other persecuted segments targeted by the Nazi regime were forced to resort to such horrid living conditions in order to survive.
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January 1, 2024School
March 21, 2025
Very helpful! Amazing and expansive scholarship
March 21, 2024
Imagine at the end of World War II you are an American occupation official and you have to decide what to do with a child. The child was left by his Jewish parents with their Christian neighbors as a toddler for safekeeping. At the end of the war the parents are dead, but aunts and uncles want the child to raise as Jewish, perhaps in America or Palestine (but not in Eastern Europe). The Christian couple has grown very attached to the child and the child knows nothing but his Christian family. The Christian couple risked their own life and perhaps the lives of their own children and neighbors to save the Jewish couple's child. Where does this child belong? Should the child be raised Jewish or Christian? Does the child belong with blood relatives or with the rescuing family.
After World War II millions of Europeans were on the move - freed concentration camp prisoners, freed prisoners of war, freed slave labor. Many people were moving as the victims of ethnic cleansing in Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Russia and other European countries. Where people belonged was a huge question. Who answered those questions for children raised its own complex questions.
How people chose to answer those questions about children depended a lot on how they viewed nationality, ethnicity, who could assimilate and who couldn't, demographic imperatives, gender, communism, capitalism and a host of other divides. In the case of children, people had to be much more vocal about their thinking because children were not trusted to make decisions for their own benefit.
Tara Zahra has written a fascinating account of how these questions were addressed across Europe, East and West, after the war. Children became a canvas to discuss new psychoanalytical theories, to express national aspirations and prejudices and pawns between Communists and Capitalists. Things became really complicated. For instance, Czechoslovakia engaged in a mass ethnic cleansing after World War II expelling all ethnic Germans regardless of their sympathies. However, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks (and Jews) had lived together in this area for centuries. How were children of Czech fathers and German mothers get classified? Was the answer different if the child's mother was Czech and the child's father was German? What to do with the children of Black American soldiers and White Europeans?
Most of us are aware of the broad outlines of World War II. We know so little about the 10 years after the war, when the whole world had to be remade. Ms. Zahra's book provides one look into that incredible uncertain time. This is the third book by Ms. Zahra I have read, all of them somehow related to mas migrations of humans. She does an amazing job of telling the human effects of global phenomenon. This book is a little older than the other two. The book strays a little more into academic jargon than her later books. This book relies far more on pre-existing analytical frameworks than her later books. Nevertheless, this book is so interesting in the problems faced and the solutions and ideologies developed for those problems. I am very much a fan of Ms. Zahra, an academic historian who writes for a general audience.
After World War II millions of Europeans were on the move - freed concentration camp prisoners, freed prisoners of war, freed slave labor. Many people were moving as the victims of ethnic cleansing in Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Russia and other European countries. Where people belonged was a huge question. Who answered those questions for children raised its own complex questions.
How people chose to answer those questions about children depended a lot on how they viewed nationality, ethnicity, who could assimilate and who couldn't, demographic imperatives, gender, communism, capitalism and a host of other divides. In the case of children, people had to be much more vocal about their thinking because children were not trusted to make decisions for their own benefit.
Tara Zahra has written a fascinating account of how these questions were addressed across Europe, East and West, after the war. Children became a canvas to discuss new psychoanalytical theories, to express national aspirations and prejudices and pawns between Communists and Capitalists. Things became really complicated. For instance, Czechoslovakia engaged in a mass ethnic cleansing after World War II expelling all ethnic Germans regardless of their sympathies. However, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks (and Jews) had lived together in this area for centuries. How were children of Czech fathers and German mothers get classified? Was the answer different if the child's mother was Czech and the child's father was German? What to do with the children of Black American soldiers and White Europeans?
Most of us are aware of the broad outlines of World War II. We know so little about the 10 years after the war, when the whole world had to be remade. Ms. Zahra's book provides one look into that incredible uncertain time. This is the third book by Ms. Zahra I have read, all of them somehow related to mas migrations of humans. She does an amazing job of telling the human effects of global phenomenon. This book is a little older than the other two. The book strays a little more into academic jargon than her later books. This book relies far more on pre-existing analytical frameworks than her later books. Nevertheless, this book is so interesting in the problems faced and the solutions and ideologies developed for those problems. I am very much a fan of Ms. Zahra, an academic historian who writes for a general audience.
June 18, 2015
This was a good and somewhat depressing book. It was a scholarly book about what happened to children after WWII. Many children were orphans and many children were offspring of very mixed marriages (French mothers, German fathers). So everybody fought over these kids, and they thought that their country would give them the best hope in the future. For example, Jewish infants, given to French women to raise, when the parents were not found or known killed were fought over by the French "mothers," the state of Israel, and whatever agency had control over that region. Interestingly, offspring of black GIs and French mothers were not wanted by anybody, and they (the controlling agencies, tried to ship the kids off to Tunisia.
One thing I would have been interested in is how the kids came out of this--they seemed to be very adaptive.
I found out about this book by going to a University of Chicago alumni thing and hearing the author. She has won a MacArthur genius fellowship since then.
One thing I would have been interested in is how the kids came out of this--they seemed to be very adaptive.
I found out about this book by going to a University of Chicago alumni thing and hearing the author. She has won a MacArthur genius fellowship since then.
September 29, 2015
Enlightening look at national politics and refugees.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews