Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the UBC History Department Graduate Students Assocation. 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, Zahra’s 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.
Biography
Tara Zahra is an Associate Professor of East European History at The University of Chicago where the focus of her research and teaching is Eastern and Central Europe as well as Germany and France. Her particular interests lie in the history of migration and displacement, nationalism (and indifference to nationalism), and gender, childhood and the family.
Select Books and Articles Available at UBC Library
Zahra, Tara. (2011). The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Link]
Zahra, Tara. (2011). “The Psychological Marshall Plan”: Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II. Central European History 44 (March 2011), 37-62. [Link]
Zahra, Tara. (2008). Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Children as Victims / Refugees of War (Excluding WWI and WWII) Bibliography
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.