"Invisible" Children: The Selection and Integration Strategies of Relief Organizations

Abstract

Through evaluating files maintained by Jewish emigration agencies and British relief organizations that coordinated the Kindertransports and accommodations for children in exile in Great Britain, the author demonstrates that, in striving to accomplish the rescue of as many children as possible and provision of the best possible care for them after their arrival, certain strategic considerations were not abandoned. The Jewish emigration agencies—here the welfare office of the Viennese Jewish Community—wanted to be sure not to endanger an extended refugee program for children by placing children with adjustment problems on the Kindertransports. Therefore children were chosen according to their expected ability to integrate into a new environment. The Refugee Children's Movement, too, aimed to integrate the children as discreetly as possible into British society. One hoped thereby to prevent an increase in antisemitic and anti-German resentments against refugees.

The education of Walter Kohn and the creation of density functional theory

“…One quarter of the Kindertransport children came from Austria and the Jewish Community of Vienna [Israelitsche Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG)] was responsible for deciding which children would receive exit visas from amongst the great many applications they received (Curio 2004). Initially, the IKG focused on urgent cases, including stateless children under threat of expulsion and children in orphanages.…”

‘They don’t look like children’: child asylum-seekers, the Dubs amendment and the politics of childhood

“…Yet, as Kushner suggests, the appeal of the Kindertransport story has resulted in an unwillingness to confront the actual moral and political messiness of the scheme and its implementation. Whilst this is now gradually changing, through the work of historians such as Tony Kushner, Caroline Shaples and Jennifer Craig-Norton, there is still little room in the current official memory of the initiative for scrutiny of, for example, the political resistance encountered by the scheme's initial proposal, or for the discriminatory selection procedures which determined which children would be rescued (see Curio and Axelrod 2004). Furthermore, a particular image of the very young Jewish child refugee which has established itself in the public imagination is at odds with the fact that early in the scheme, priority was given to adolescent boys of 16-17 years of age, as this was the group most likely to be detained or interned under National Socialism (Fast 2011, 25).…”