In spring 1945, Grete Fischer discovered that her brother and his wife had perished in Auschwitz but that his children had survived the war hidden in a municipal nursery in Grenoble. The headmistress there refused to return the boys to their aunt, insisting instead that she alone had earned the right to raise the two youngsters. Maintaining that it would be cruel to separate the children from the only mother they knew, the headmistress secretly baptized the boys and arranged for them to be smuggled into Spain. The ensuing sensational postwar custody battle inflamed long-standing tensions between Jewish communal leaders and French governmental agencies, Catholics and anti-Clerical activists, and Jews and non-Jews in France.

In her gripping book, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II, Tara Zahra teases out how this and other events across postwar Europe raised complex questions concerning the fate of European displaced children in the aftermath of war. Who was best equipped to care for these youngsters? Where would they thrive? What ideologies could rehabilitate them? With whom did they belong?

World War II unleashed unparalleled violence against children and witnessed unprecedented humanitarian movements to protect them. The Holocaust and World War II displaced thousands of children, uprooting them from their families and countries of origin. These youth became symbols of wartime dislocation and postwar reconstruction as relatives, foster parents, military authorities, displaced persons, and governmental officials debated the children's rehabilitation. Such disputes were at the center of what Zahra terms a “psychological Marshall Plan.”

During the postwar period, policy makers and relief workers coupled their humanitarian efforts on behalf of displaced youth to the rejection of fascist ideology and to the renewal of European democracy or socialism. Anglo-American humanitarian workers envisioned the family as central both to individual rehabilitation efforts and to the restoration of democratic order. While the notion of the reconstructed family sometimes conflicted with the aspiration for national autonomy, many of these humanitarian workers and diplomats asserted that the reconstruction of Europe was dependent on the rebuilding of families. They believed not only that children experienced the separation from family members as more traumatic than wartime horror, but also that family was inexorably linked with democracy. In their view, Nazism and later, communism, destroyed parental authority and threatened democratic political order. Central and eastern European ideologues and activists concomitantly promoted a collectivist vision of child care in which peer groups promoted psychological well-being. Both the Anglo-American and central/eastern European proposals had their roots in wartime experiments in child care and education, as well as in Zionist, socialist, and nationalist traditions.

Children also came to represent differing understandings of the biological and political future of national communities. Claims about family and nation often were in conflict, illustrating and preserving disparate nationalist and racial hierarchies that were at the core of migration and citizenship politics. Many humanitarian workers, diplomats, displaced persons, and advocates argued that familial separation was not only traumatic for children, but that it also hindered the rebuilding of a war-torn Europe. They insisted that children be returned to family members, no matter where these relatives now resided. Other activists identified these children as their nation's own, insisting that the significance of national home outweighed returning children to recently discovered relatives. Rethinking the emerging truism that a child's well-being could best be served with his family of origin, these advocates suggested that a return to family could be more disturbing than keeping a child in the milieu to which he had become accustomed. Others similarly argued that repatriating Jewish children to Jewish families only perpetuated the racial thinking of the Nazis. Such arguments were voiced with tremendous frequency in countries such as France where thousands of Jewish children had been saved from the Nazis in hiding.

Sometimes, humanitarian workers, foster parents, diplomats, and government officials recognized children as belonging to a nation even if those youngsters had been born elsewhere. In France, for example, administrators welcomed Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust on French territory. Such an embrace demonstrated traditions of asylum and republic solidarity. Other state officials rejected certain categories of youth as foreign. In the United States, American military officials rebuffed the children born to American soldiers and German women, while Czech officials marginalized those youth with German-born parents. Issues of state, citizenship, ethnicity, and the Cold War became inexorably linked in conversations concerning the care and movement of children.

Postwar concerns about youth also led to new theories about child development and the construction of healthy families. Diplomats, psychologists, and humanitarian workers tested and applied new theories of child development at displaced person camps, youth homes, and orphanages. Such a focus on psychological rehabilitation served as a crucial shift in twentieth-century relief work. Earlier humanitarian efforts had focused solely on refugees' physical needs. Now, advocates expressed concern about the psychological aftershocks of war and displacement.

The Lost Children serves as a significant addition to the scholarship on European reconstruction, particularly the literature concerning the place of children in postwar debates. Much of the recently published work concerning postwar educational trends, migration, rehabilitation, and custody disputes focuses on specific national, religious, or ethnic narratives. Zahra's real strength lies in her deft ability to tell her story with a transnational focus. By broadening her gaze, she teases out trends and narratives that might be overlooked in a narrower examination. Her study, however, would have been deepened had she more explicitly engaged with some of that scholarship to tease out the ways in which her assertions uphold or dispute claims made when writing nationalist histories.

Zahra masterfully links nationalist politics, wide-ranging trends, and educational theories to argue that children were at the center of conversations about politics and ideologies. She also offers insight into contemporary debates about international adoption, child rearing, and humanitarian relief. The Lost Children is an important book for historians of Europe, war, migration, and childhood.