After the Second World War, millions of people roamed Europe in search of lost family members. The problem of missing children (and of missing parents) was particularly grave. Whether due to bombings, military service, evacuation, deportation, forced labor, ethnic cleansing, or murder, an unprecedented number of children were separated from their families during World War II. The International Tracing Service, founded in 1944, had registered 343,057 missing children in Europe by 1956. Uniting families was far more than a challenging logistical and humanitarian problem, however. So-called “lost children” held a special grip on the postwar imagination, as symbols of European societies and families in disarray. They stood at the center of bitter political and social conflicts, as military authorities, German foster parents, social workers, Jewish agencies, East European Communists, and Displaced Persons (DPs) themselves competed to determine their fates. These battles were linked, in turn, to emerging ideals of human rights, the family, democracy, child welfare, and the reconstruction of European civilization at large. In the words of Vinita A. Lewis, a social worker with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Germany, “The lost identity of individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of Europe…. Even if his future destiny lies in a country other than that of his origin, he [the displaced child] is entitled to the basic Human Right of full knowledge of his background and origin.”
