In the aftermath of the Second World War, Poland faced an acute humanitarian crisis involving tens of thousands of abandoned and orphaned children. Among the most politically and morally contested were children of German citizens and Volksdeutsche, whose presence challenged the emerging postwar order built on ethnic homogenization, retribution, and state consolidation. This paper examines how local and central authorities in postwar Poland managed the care of these children between 1945 and the early postwar years, focusing on the intersection of humanitarian practice, national security concerns, and ethnic prejudice. The study provides insight into attempts to establish administrative order during a humanitarian emergency, highlighting how welfare systems became instruments for categorizing, surveilling, and ultimately deciding who had the right to remain within the postwar Polish state. Decisions regarding institutionalization, adoption, “verification,” or expulsion expose the blurred boundary between care and punishment, as well as the moral ambiguities faced by social workers, local officials, and state authorities. By foregrounding the experiences and administrative handling of German and Volksdeutsche children, this paper contributes to broader discussions on postwar population politics, transitional justice, and the role of humanitarian institutions in moments of radical political transformation. It demonstrates how child welfare became a site where questions of belonging, trust, and national reconstruction were negotiated in everyday bureaucratic practice. (Maria Buko)

This paper examines the governance of orphaned and abandoned children in the Italo–Yugoslav border region after the Second World War, with a particular focus on Slovenian evironment. Drawing on administrative records, social welfare reports, and institutional documentation, it analyses how orphans were defined, categorised, and managed in a region shaped by shifting borders, population displacement, and post-war reconstruction. On the Slovenian side, early post-war policies framed orphan care primarily through institutional and collective solutions, reflecting socialist approaches to welfare and childhood. Orphanages, foster care, and welfare authorities played a central role in addressing war loss while simultaneously integrating children into broader projects of social and political reorganisation. Orphans were thus positioned not only as vulnerable dependents but also as future members of the socialist community. By situating orphan care within a contested borderland, the paper highlights the intersection of child welfare, state-building, and political ideology, and challenges simplified narratives of post-war social policy in Central and Southeastern Europe.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, international humanitarian organisations were confronted with the challenge of responding to the needs of thousands of displaced and unaccompanied minors across Europe. While the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) initially prioritised the repatriation of children to their countries of origin, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which assumed responsibility in 1947, shifted its focus toward resettlement as a solution to displacement. Yet this transition revealed profound structural tensions: not all children could be accommodated within emerging postwar migration regimes. By the early 1950s, a considerable number of minors had become excluded from emigration schemes due to medical, psychological and social classifications that rendered them “unfit” for resettlement. Designated as so-called “residual cases,” these minors occupied a precarious position at the intersection of humanitarian care and restrictive immigration policies. The talk examines how the IRO sought to manage this group through intensified rehabilitation efforts that aimed to render children employable, adaptable and thus acceptable to receiving countries. Drawing on primary sources, especially from the IRO collections held at the French National Archives and the Hoover Archives of Stanford University, it analyses specialised educational and therapeutic programmes in shaping children’s life chances. Within this broader group, this paper focuses on a sample of children who remained in postwar Austria after the closure of large-scale repatriation and resettlement programmes. These children, who were deemed medically, psychologically or socially unfit for immediate emigration, found themselves in a particularly precarious position within the humanitarian system. By situating postwar child welfare within broader debates on trauma, marginalisation and postwar reconstruction, this study argues that humanitarian interventions often produced contradictory effects. While designed to foster recovery and social reintegration, they could also deepen existing vulnerabilities by reactivating trauma and reinforcing stigmatising classifications. Ultimately, the talk highlights how displaced children’s futures were profoundly shaped not only by the violence of war, but also by the institutional frameworks that managed their rehabilitation and resettlement in the postwar period.

On July 8, 1941, the inspector-general of the Romanian police (the gendarmerie) and the Ministry of the Interior gazetted an order “to arrest all Jews who remain in the rural areas of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and northern Transylvania, irrespective of sex and age, and to round them up for deportation” Some 150,000 Jews in these areas were sent to Transnistria by order of Prime Minister Antonescu. The deportees were placed in concentration camps and ghettoes, where most of them perished due to hunger, sickness, and torture. Only a third of them survived to greet the day in August 1944 when Antonescu’s government was overthrown and Romania left the Nazi coalition. This presentation follows the path of the Romanian Jewish orphans who survived the ordeal and violence of deportation to Transinistria and aims to portrait the atrocities, the traumatic and violent experiences they have experienced in those temporal disparities, but also to enlighten brotherhood, and the social spaces they have managed to create "in the darkness". What did those spaces include? What were the various activities carried out within the ghettoes, and how have they impacted the daily life of the children, orphans and youngsters that were left to cope with the uncertain conditions in Transnistria? By focusing on their diaries, the OSE reports, the letters the orphans wrote to their sponsors around the world, and the testimonies given for Yad Vashem, the paper sheds light on those survivors' painful memories of loss of parents, childhood, community and feeling of displacement. "Orphans were picked up from the alleys, rescued from ruined houses, from barns, and from among piles of corpses. Most were sick, frozen to the bone, skinny dirty and silent. Bundles of sorrow. Silent scared and deeply saddened. A stark mirror image of myself". Ruth Glasberg Gold (b. 1930 in Bukovina), was one of these orphans. By 1942, rumors were circulating about goings-on in the ghettos of Transnistria and galvanized the onset of joint rescue efforts by the Jewish Center in Bucharest, JDC, ICRC, the WIZO women’s organization, and the OSE. Three kinds of action were dominant: creating social spaces for this age and status group, meaning - setting up orphanages in Transnistria, raising funds and obtaining assistance with medicines via the Judenzentrale in Bucharest, and negotiations to extricate the orphans. Finally, after endless efforts, the first wave of repatriation occurred in May 6, 1944 and encompassed 1,909 orphaned children up to age fifteen, out of some 8,000 orphans who remained alive in Transnistria in 1944. Dispersed around Romania for care, some of them were admitted to Jewish homes and orphanages of the OSE and other rescue organizations while others were lucky "to catch a boat" en-route to Eretz Israel.