The scale of the task
By the end of the war, millions of people were moving across Europe: people taken away for forced labor, refugees, and those liberated from camps. Children were constantly lost in this flow: during bombings, evacuations, and family separations. Many ended up in shelters in foreign countries.
Searches were carried out by specially created groups within international organizations. They visited shelters and villages, compiled lists, compared them with relatives' reports, and maintained a huge card index, creating a card for each person.
Collect reports. Relatives submitted information about those who were missing: their name, age, and where they were last seen.
Visit shelters. Staff recorded every child without documents, noting their appearance and the circumstances in which they had arrived.
Compare details. They looked for matches based on dates, scars, distinctive features, and fragments of information about the parents.
Verify and reunite. They confirmed a match through additional checks, and only then began the process of returning the child.
The card indexes became enormous: millions of cards arranged phonetically, so people could be found despite different spellings of their names. Some of these archives are still operating and accepting requests from descendants.
Children who did not remember their names
The hardest part of the work involved young children. A 2- or 3-year-old does not know their surname or city, and if they were taken away even younger, they may not remember the language either. They were identified through small details: embroidery on their clothes, a song they sang, or a word pronounced with a particular accent.
Sometimes a mark on a child's shirt or a melody they remembered was the only record of their identity.
Some children were never found, while others were found decades later. There are known cases of people learning about their origins only in old age, through an archive request made by their own grandchildren.
This experience gave rise to rules that are still in place today. A separated child is registered immediately, everything known about them is recorded, and adoption is not rushed until the search is complete. At the time, it was precisely rushed decisions that proved the hardest to undo.
How was a child found if they did not remember their name?
Why was adoption of a separated child not rushed?
Sources
- Searches were carried out by services affiliated with UNRRA and the International Committee of the Red Cross
- the largest archive on displaced persons, assembled in Bad Arolsen, contains millions of cards and still processes requests
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