http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa25807
Reisele Kirkel was only two months old when Germany invaded Lithuania. Her mother and siblings died in concentration camps, but she survived due to her mother’s efforts to hide her. In this photograph, she posed with her doll at the Feldafing DP camp where she stayed with her father after the end of World War II. She clutched onto a baby doll, symbolically trying to retain a semblance of childhood normalcy and innocence. Powerful countries controlled the fate of displaced children like Kirkel. They formulated and discussed policies that concerned their political interests based on their opinions on where displaced people should live, and on a generalization of a refugee’s character.
Tara Zahra discusses the relocation of displaced children (primarily as replacements for the mass amounts of loss of life) in her article entitled, “A Human Treasure: Europe’s Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism.” I found it interesting that French policy-makers wanted to take children from other countries to augment their own population, but were gracelessly particular about the children they considered for citizenship. The race of the child was very important. The children of French colonial soldiers were excluded from adoption in France unless they had white skin (Zahra, 339). If the goal was to make up for the “loss of human capital,” the question of race, logically, should not have been so important (Zahra, 336). This example of the French government’s racial concern about who can be considered “French” shows why ethnic nationalism made it difficult for countries to accept people of a former nationality.
According to Gerard Cohen, in his book In War’s Wake, the “refugee problem” shaped modern humanitarianism by leading to the creation of international operations to deal with human suffering (Cohen, 10). The countries involved did not share the same ideologies on justice and purpose of nationality. The USSR held the belief that people who did not want to go back to their country of origin were war criminals. The USSR wanted to punish these criminals and deport nationals back home where they would undergo mandatory hard labor. This generalization of refugees is harmful to people who have traumatic psychological reasons for not wanting to return to their home country. The United States felt that supporting the refugees was costly and burdensome, and Great Britain saw the problem as posing a threat to world peace and security. Each country wanted to handle the “refugee problem” based on their own preferences. As I read Cohen’s description of the debates of world leaders concerning displaced people in the first chapter, I felt like the arguments continued without end. I wonder if this was an intentional stylistic choice, to show how the debates were prolonged while people remained homeless living in refugee camps.
Millions of people became displaced after World War II, including Poles who survived slave labor, Jews who survived death camps, Balts and Ukranians who survived the Red Army, and people affected by post-war border changes (Cohen, 6). The medium of photography and video allows for us to see the effects of dislocation. This video is a compilation of scenes of displaced people in the setting of ruined buildings. It was taken in March 1945 in Wesel, Germany.
This question of who decides a displaced person’s nationality is a question that we have yet to solve. Cohen and Zahra discuss these people’s experiences with governments who had political and racial interests in mind. The displaced people’s best interests, according to UNRRA and IRO social workers, were the interests of the countries they would be allowed to live in. I am interested to see how children reacted to acquiring a new nationality, or if there were any considerable skirmishes among people who were forced to be in a country in which they did not want to live.
Sources:
Cohen, Gerard Daniel. In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
I really enjoyed that you incorporated a video into your blog it was a great visual that gave an insight into the lives of DPs. It was interesting to read your points on the way the French claimed which Displaced Children could legally become French citizens. It draws on notion that racial superiority was still prominent in Europe even following the something as horrific as the Holocaust (German’s believed Jews were a race). It can also be connected to the Lidice children because only the ones that reflected Aryan characteristics would be spared the horrors of the Concentration Camps and raised in German families. The fact that the French only wanted white children to contribute to their repopulation following the war makes one wonder if they learned nothing from the atrocities of the Nazi regime and their efforts to control who could be a citizen of their nation.