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Unaccompanied Children's Access to Healthcare 1945-1950


UCARE1945 is a project examines issues relating to access to healthcare for children in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Unaccompanied Children’s Access to Healthcare (1945-1950)

Unaccompanied Children’s Access to Healthcare (1945-1950) (UCARE1945) is a Marie Sklodowska Curie funded research project. It examines issues relating to access to healthcare and financial compensation for medical harm done during the Second World War and explores how such practices have shaped ways of understanding care for refugees. UCARE1945 will consider how discrimination based on age, statehood and gender played a role in pathways to healthcare in the immediate postwar era and will focus on the life narratives of child survivors of the Holocaust. It will be the first project to identify and analyse the life narratives of child survivors in relation to access to healthcare, combining research with archival sources, medical data, and lived experiences.This study will identify and analyse a selection of this archival material in order to chart the life histories of some of these young survivors. This project aims to expand knowledge of the complex issues child refugees faced in the immediate aftermath of World War II and will investigate how antisemitism and other forms of racism affected health care. These issues remain relevant today in the light of the resurgence of antisemitism and xenophobia in Europe and this project aims to contribute to the EU strategy on combating antisemitism and other forms of racism, with links to sustainable development goals SDG5 and 10. 

Aims and Questions of Unaccompanied Children’s Access to Healthcare (1945-1950) (UCARE1945)

UCARE1945 aims to investigate how issues of gender, age, and language impacted medical care for unaccompanied minors during the years 1945 to 1950.

1. The central research question asks: what factors influenced medical care for unaccompanied children in the immediate postwar era, and to what extent did these factors affect the care they received? Rather than approaching the history of medical care in the aftermath of the Holocaust solely through statistics and medical records, I draw on life narratives and read them alongside these other forms of archival materials to consider how children’s life experiences were documented or erased in the archive. In understanding these impacts, this research will expand our knowledge about healthcare crises in the past.

2. The project will conduct a comprehensive literature review which will shape further questions, and will help to determine the impacts of the war on the individuals life experience and memory.

3. Information will be gathered from institutional records and from personal testimony, so we can ascertain the different variables that impacted medical care over time. This will be compared between occupation zones to determine concrete policies that affected change. 

Zones of Interest: Unaccompanied Children in Postwar Europe, 1945-1950

Introduction

In the aftermath of the Second World War, 60 million people were displaced, most of whom were unaccompanied children. When the war ended in Europe, the Allied forces established zones of control in former Nazi occupied lands, splitting Germany into a British Zone, American Zone, French Zone and Russian Zone. This division laid the groundwork for the later Cold War between East and West.

People required medical assistance following the years of deprivation during the war, often enduring concentration camps or living in hiding. Many had to travel great distances to get this care, or to find lost family members. Children that were classified as stateless, or had no documentation to prove their identity struggled even more. This exhibition examines archival documents and oral histories provided by the children, along with institutional documents to understand how care is provided in times of material want.

'Primary directive: [...] provision must be made for their general well being while awaiting repatriation. [...] measures must be taken to prevent the spread of dangerous epidemic diseases'

After the war, in the four occupation zones, Displaced Persons camps were set up to care for the refugee population. The aim was to contain diseases, verify identities, and provide training so survivors could integrate with the wider world. Some people were able to leave these camps quickly, others stayed until 1950 and were known as ‘hardcore’ displaced persons.

The loss of children's ties to family members meant they were expected to navigate an adult world with little guidance. When children emigrated, the ideal of the smiling innocent child who was thrilled to be given a chance was often not the reality; with individuals suffering disabling medical conditions, along with trauma and displacement.

Doctors were tasked with verifying the health of survivors for emigration papers and to leave Displaced Persons Camps. Access to emigration and compensation was mediated through medical care.

DDT Powder and the fight against typhus

Typhus was one of the biggest concerns in the postwar era, with military and civilians, doctors and lay people alike terrified of a typhus pandemic. In the absence of sanitary facilities, DDT powder was used to prevent the spread of typhus by dusting people at transit points, in displaced persons camps, dusting clothes and homes. Delousing was much more than a simple puff of white powder though, it was one of the first experiences of recovery and reintegration. It could be a literal path to a new life, with documentation that one had undergone delousing, opening borders to inter zonal migration.

Despite this, there was rarely any specific regulation on how the child's body differed to that of adults, and how their delousing might be different. Some soldiers deloused children without paying adequate attention to them, others were too thorough, putting a puff of powder directly in their face, which was quite distressing. Others laughed at each other getting sprayed.

'Children would disappear out of their hospital beds as soon as they were strong enough to walk, their craving to find their own people beyond control.’

Dr Robert Collis was an Irish pediatrician who put forward plans to send Irish doctors to Europe to help with the medical crisis for displaced persons and survivors of concentration camps. While the British government helped to set up a hospital in Normandy, Dr Collis travelled to Bergen Belsen to work in the Glyn Hughes hospital set up in the former camp to help survivors. He wrote extensively about his work there, in The Ultimate Value and Straight On. Collis described problems with supplies, as well as the mental and physical effects of the concentration camps on children. He noted the death rate from typhus and starvation continued to grow despite liberation, and how DDT dusting was an essential task to prevent a mass epidemic. Dorothy MacArdle, an Irish journalist, wrote extensively about what she saw in Europe after the war in Children of Europe. She drew attention to the medical impact of the camps, but also shed a light on how resourceful and independent these children could be

"How did they make the selection? . . . There was a big apparatus … I wonder today if 48 nations could sit down and make a plan for refugees.”

Children were often viewed from the perspective of becoming, rather than being, and this was particularly true in the immediate aftermath of war where they were viewed as future citizens rather than current survivors. This considerably impacted their care in terms of how they were prepared for life outside displaced persons camps. Girls were often trained for domestic roles, while boys were trained for manual labour. Girls ‘threshold of responsibility’ was often much lower, with them forced to adapt to caring roles within displaced persons camps much younger than boys. Migration schemes to get out of displaced persons camps was predicated on national quotas, and on labour shortages - for example, many girls moved to England as domestic servants in the postwar era as this was what they could get a visa for. This forced many young teenagers to avoid going to school, instead training in roles they knew would lead to a visa.

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Email: ashalvey@ucc.ie

This research forms part of research funded by the European Commission within the framework of H2020-EU.1.3.2.Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for the project UCARE1945 Grant agreement ID: 101204157 

 

Unaccompanied Children's Access to Healthcare 1945-1950

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