British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Lost Souls: Efforts to retrieve Jewish children after the Holocaust

Dr Pamela Shatzkes

While over one million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis, several thousand survived by being given over to the care of Christian families, monasteries and convents. Soon after the end of the war, efforts began to retrieve these children. In some cases it was not difficult to locate children who had been kept for monetary reasons, but children who had been placed in Christian families, often childless, and those placed in Catholic institutions and subsequently baptized and brought up as Catholic, were much more difficult to retrieve. Jewish organizations and individuals in Britain, Palestine and America were active in trying to identify and resettle these children. They frequently met with stubborn resistance. Legal battles often ensued and the long-drawn out controversies struck at the heart of Christian-Jewish relations in the immediate post-war years, exacerbating an already strained relationship.

Very little academic work has been published on this subject. A number of personal memoirs were written by the children who had been hidden during the war but they contain very little information regarding the efforts made to retrieve them afterwards. Moreover, most of the primary source material is not easily accessible or indexed. Thanks to the generosity of the British Academy, I was able to visit the United States and Israel, and gather a substantial amount of relevant documents from the various voluntary organisations involved in this work.

The New-York based American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) proved to be an important resource for this topic and I gathered valuable material on efforts made to reclaim Jewish children in Holland, Belgium and France, although the material on Poland was rather scant. The Agudat Israel Archives (which hold, inter alia, Rescue Children, Inc. papers) and the Vaad Hatzalah papers at Yeshiva university (holding Children’s Salvation material) were extremely  useful especially in revealing some of the clandestine activities undertaken in retrieving Jewish War orphans, some of whom were ransomed or taken under false pretences from their foster parents or Catholic Institutions. My visit to the USHMM in Washington was short yet fruitful as I found some microfilm material from the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The WJC Memorandum to the first session of the UNRRA Council stressed the fate of Jewish orphans and the desirability of directing orphaned Jewish children to Palestine within the so-called Youth Aliyah movement. Yet this was not straightforward as the situation in Palestine was problematic for the British Government. There is a wealth of material held in these various archives and although I was only in the States for a few weeks, I covered quite a lot of ground and gathered (photocopied) a substantial amount of primary source material as well as getting a good sense of how much more there is to explore on this subject.

A second visit, a few months later, to Israel was equally productive. Yad Vashem holds copies of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) papers and, having acquired permission from Paris, I was able to see some of this material, in particular the Commission de Depistage, an important organisation set up specifically for retrieving Jewish children in France. I was assisted by an excellent research assistant in Jerusalem who, in addition to my own findings, provided me with some useful documents from the Israel State Archives, the Central Zionist Archives (holding papers of Youth Aliyah, the Jewish Agency and the British Section of World Jewish Congress) and the Herzog library at the Rav Kook Institute. I visited the Oral History Department at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University in Jerusalem where I gathered a long list (for future reference) of interviews under the heading ‘Jewish War Orphans Project’.

In the UK, I have spent several months at the London Beth Din Archives, the Board of Deputies, and the Central British Fund (held at the London Metropolitan Archives) all of which have substantial material on the subject. I have been fortunate in acquiring some of the private papers of Dayan Grunfeld who headed the ‘Commission on Jewish War Orphans’.)

I have also been able to interview a number of people who were involved in finding Jewish children who had been hidden during the war. For example, while in Israel, I met Evelyn Chenken, who had been sent by the London Beth Din’s ‘Commission on Jewish War Orphans’ to help find and retrieve Jewish children in France. This meeting was most informative and Evelyn provided me with fascinating insights into a very complex story. I interviewed, in Amsterdam, Meijer van der Sluis, who had been a social worker with one of the organisations, Le’Ezrath Ha’yeled, after the War. He provided a clear and objective perspective of the issues and explained why every case was different and why it was not always in the best interest of the child that it be returned to the Jewish fold. 

Overall, I gained a much clearer picture of the complicated issues involved and realise that this is a huge topic. Each case and country differed as to its policy and success rate -for example, among the various aspects of this subject, the legal ‘ownership’ of children and questions of repatriation presented unique problems. In the case of Holland, for example, the War Orphans Commission in many cases ruled that the children in non-Jewish home (estimated at 3-4,000 in 1945) should remain where they were. If any Jewish organisation or relative wanted a surviving orphan transferred to a Jewish environment, he/she had to prove that the parents were Orthodox, Zionist or at least practising Jews. This was often impossible to do. The Dutch case is particularly complicated and even where the Commission or Law Courts permitted the return of an orphan to a Jewish environment, there were cases where the children were withheld and even abducted once released (Anneke Beekman and Betty Melhado). The issue of Jewish war orphans became a matter of embittered debate in the post war years in Holland and seriously damaged Christian-Jewish relations.

In the Belgian and French case the position was somewhat easier but still fraught with problems. The Belgian situation was complicated by the fact that under the law of that country, the individual or institution which had possession of that child was considered its legal guardian and the process of getting the youngster away from those guardians was complex and often protracted but the success rate was high. The French Jewish community also met with strong opposition when trying to reclaim Jewish war orphans. (e.g. the Finlay boys in the 1950s). In many cases those who refused to hand over the children had the support of some church leaders. (This is where the whole debate of the (supposed) Vatican directive to the Archbishop Angelo Roncalli in Paris to withhold Jewish children who had been baptized comes in.) Even in Britain, where the situation was different from occupied Europe, similar problems in retrieving Jewish children who had been placed in non-Jewish homes also arose.

The issue became more complicated when foreign organizations and individuals tried to take the children out of the country. Although Jewish, they had no claim over these children. There was a reluctance particularly in eastern Europe to hand over these children to western foreigners (although the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Dr.Herzog, managed in 1946 to retrieve almost 1000 war orphans).  In addition, it would set a precedent for other orphaned children. No doubt many of these children became, for the rescue organizations and individuals, part of a wider religious and/or political agenda. They were regarded as Jewish souls to be saved for the cause of Judaism, or alternatively, as potential young settlers in Palestine. Some were targeted as the future hope of a re-established Jewish community in Europe itself.

There are many issues involved in this subject. The British Academy’s generous research grant enabled me to travel and find the primary source material needed. I am now in the process of documenting and analysing a very complicated and under researched topic of the post war era. Moreover, having the backing and support of the British Academy has reinforced my belief that this is a worthwhile and important subject to explore. I hope to develop my research into a book.