Cruel World (87 page)

A schism also developed among the Polish Red Cross workers helping UNRRA in Austria. Here, the so-called Second Polish Corps Red Cross, mostly very anti-Communist Poles, deserted to set up their own camps and took with them most of the records relating to unaccompanied children. The dissident actions were tolerated at first by UNRRA and the Army, as the Second Corps homes and camps were extremely well supplied with food and better able to take care of the children. Their supplies were more plentiful because they were being subsidized by the Vatican, Polish exile groups in the United States and Britain, the Swiss, and other charities, as well as by rations donated by Second Polish Corps soldiers. Everything went swimmingly for a time, but when it became known that all the Polish children, like the Jewish ones, must be centrally registered with UNRRA so that they could be repatriated if their parents were found in Poland, the Second Corps people also began to hide children in houses outside the camps. This group of Poles also avoided sending names to the various tracing services run by civilian and military agencies.
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UNRRA was never able to compile proper lists, and after a time it was clear that here too groups of children were clandestinely being brought out of Poland and taken from other UNRRA camps to Italy and France without checking their origins. These hasty transfers led to mistakes: six of the children in one batch were from a German family who had appealed to UNRRA in desperation for the return of their offspring. Protests from UNRRA and the U.S. Army over the Polish actions sank into red tape and obfuscations of all kinds, as the Second Corps contingent had plenty of sympathy in the Western world. At one point they did repatriate twenty-two youngsters who had parents in Poland through UNRRA, but thousands of Polish children who had been scattered all over the world during the war were never reported to the international agencies. Many would be kept away forever from their now Communist-run homeland, and their parents would never see them again.
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The conflicting interests of “blood,” religion, and politics were even
more complex in the case of Yugoslav children. In March 1946, a group of girls and boys, aged six to seventeen, were brought by U.S. Army trucks to the center at Kloster Indersdorf. They were escorted by a deacon of the Innere Mission, a charity run by the German Lutheran Church. The deacon, who had made several attempts to escape from the transport with the children, claimed that they were all orphans or that their “parents could not care for them,” and that the parents had not been real Yugoslavs but German Lutherans whose ancestors had been driven out of Germany into Slovenia 170 years ago. The Wehrmacht had evacuated the children to Germany in October 1944, where they had been ever since. The children themselves seemed terrified and only with difficulty were they persuaded to put down their luggage. It soon became clear that they were also very hungry, as the deacon had ordered them to throw away the chocolate and food provided by American soldiers. A meal was prepared, but the children refused to eat it until the deacon said a prayer and gave them permission. After dinner they prayed again and sang hymns. It was not until they were taken to have baths that, in the opinion of the UNRRA workers, they talked and laughed like normal children. The next day, after much discussion, the deacon was told that he must leave the children at Indersdorf. Upon hearing this news, the children became very emotional and the deacon “stood as if in a trance with both arms raised and eyes turned to heaven. He made no effort to part with the children, who clung to him wailing and moaning hysterically. It was with the greatest difficulty that we separated the children from him.” After he left, “it required hours to get the children calmed down. Through the help of the other children in the Center, they finally accepted their stay here, and by evening settled down more or less.” Soon after the deacon left, a delegation from the office of the bishop in Munich in charge of the Innere Mission was sent to claim the children, maintaining that they were German because

UNRRA and the Army, which by now had encountered similar groups (including one in which several teachers had been arrested as members of the SS and their replacements pressured by other “older colleagues” to continue the “teaching program of the past six years”), refused to release the children pending further investigation.
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The Catholic Church was no less determined than the Protestants to “save” Yugoslav children. At about the same time as the deacon was being escorted away from Indersdorf, representatives of the Austrian branch of UNRRA became aware of a group of forty-nine boys who were living in a resort hotel at Ramsau-bei-Schladming. They came from a Catholic school in Zagreb that had been under Nazi supervision and had been evacuated in response to Himmler’s orders in November 1944. The boys were well taken care of by three nuns. British occupation authorities had duly inspected the setup, sent in some clothes and food, and, so far, left it undisturbed. The nuns had told the inspectors that all the parents of the children “were peaceful Croatian farmer families of Catholic religion” who had not been involved in politics, but had, nevertheless, been killed by Communist partisans. Sister Anka, in charge of the group, also declared that the boys had no other relatives whatsoever who could care for them, that they were “in God’s hands,” and that she was “awaiting orders from Rome as to their disposition.” But the Yugoslav repatriation authorities, when asked, indicated that they would like to have the children back, and the UNRRA and Army child welfare workers now had to decide the children’s fate.

Conversations with the children, aged ten to fourteen, soon revealed discrepancies in Sister Anka’s statements. The boys, interviewed in her presence, had clearly been told what to say. Very few reported that they had seen their parents killed, and many revealed that they had brothers and sisters. There was no evidence of any postwar effort to find the families. Sister Anka said she was afraid of what would happen to the children if they went home, a valid reaction given the combined partisan activity and civil war that had riven Yugoslavia, as it had Greece. UNRRA therefore instituted a search for relatives and requested assurances from the authorities that children without families would be well taken care of if they returned. By October fourteen families had been found, and UNRRA inspectors, who had gone to Yugoslavia to check services for orphans, had determined these to be adequate. It was therefore decided to repatriate the Ramsau children who had families and to remove the rest to an UNRRA home while investigations continued.

When an UNRRA commission, accompanied by Yugoslav government representatives, arrived at Ramsau to arrange these transfers, they found Father Kelava, a Franciscan priest who had come from Rome, waiting for them. Most of the children, when interviewed anew, said, in remarkably similar statements, that they wanted to go to Rome and become priests.
Father Kelava said that the boys were part of a group of ninety-six children who were to go to Rome for training as missionaries. The Pope himself, he said, was interested in the children, who were “happy and enthusiastic at the thought of becoming priests.” He also said that the boys had been “handed over to us” by the parents, whose existence was now suddenly recognized. To this he added that requests from these same parents that the boys come back were probably not voluntary: “Taking into consideration the present government in Jugoslavia … who will dare to say no?” In his opinion, it was the church’s “moral” and “humane” right to take the children to Italy. The boys, he declared, were so afraid of being sent to Yugoslavia that “if they knew that they might have to leave Ramsau, tomorrow morning all the children would have disappeared.”

This remark was a red flag for the UNRRA officers, who decided to take the children to their own facility immediately and requested transportation for the following morning. During the night, Sister Anka and Father Kelava helped the children pack their rucksacks, and as the trucks approached at dawn the next day, the boys could be seen running away into the woods. Police were called and the frontier patrolled. It took two days to reassemble the children, who came back in bedraggled ones and twos and were immediately driven off in UNRRA vehicles. Here too there were dramas:

Later investigations found the parents of all but four of the children. At the UNRRA home the children were “reoriented,” now with the help of the Yugoslav Red Cross, approved by the Tito government, who were somewhat hypocritically “astonished by the extent to which political and religious dogma in opposition to repatriation had been impressed on the minds of young children.” Sister Anka, having recovered miraculously, continued to write to the boys, and it was suspected that she had enlisted staff members at the UNRRA home to encourage them to run away, which, indeed, two attempted to do. The first group of boys was sent back home in January 1947. They were still so afraid that they entrusted items
like watches to their UNRRA escort, being convinced that such things would be stolen from them by the Communists at the border. Instead, they were greeted with great celebration and fanfare. At the station in Zagreb were bands, flags, rows of children singing songs, and relays of local school groups and teachers who chatted with them. There was food in abundance, and everyone got new pants and shoes.

As soon as the children were settled in a home in Zagreb, Syma Klok, the UNRRA escort, went to find some of the families who had not yet been notified of the group’s arrival:

Another parent heard of his daughter’s arrival on the radio and came the same day to see her, and a boy who said he “had no one” was amazed when his sister appeared. Before she left, Miss Klok asked the boys if they wished to return to the UNRRA home with her. All declined, and one small boy apologized for having run away, “and thanked me for fetching him back and for bringing him home … he said he would never forget it.” The repatriation was not 100 percent successful, however. Two of the boys were lured away by Sister Anka and did not return to Yugoslavia for some time. Father Kelava is reported to have found at least fifty-seven other boys to take to Rome, with written permission this time from their sometimes illiterate parents.
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The Russian problem was different. Although the British and Americans opposed the forcible repatriation of adults, child welfare workers felt that unaccompanied Soviet children should go home, if their nationalities could be verified by such documents as birth certificates, naturally not always obtainable. Limitations imposed by the Western Allies on the activities of Soviet repatriation officers in their zones made this process even more difficult, but a number of groups were taken back under UNRRA escort. Persuading the Russians to release children held in their own zone who had parents in the West was harder.

At the end of the war a group of White Russian émigré children, who had been evacuated by the Germans from Belgrade, had ended up in the Soviet Zone. Their parents knew where they were. One enterprising mother had simply gone to the home where they were lodged and managed to come away with eight of them. An officer there had told her to take as many as she liked, but that if they were not retrieved soon they would be taken to the USSR. Five other mothers then went to the school, and after a certain amount of drama they were also given their children. The rest went off to Russia in February 1946. Senior UNRRA officials pursued the case, suggesting diplomatically that the Russians had perhaps not been aware that the children in fact had living parents. In June, the Soviets agreed to meet with a group of parents, in the presence of American officials, to see if their claims to the children were valid. It was rather an extraordinary encounter between White and Red Russians:

A few weeks later, the children were brought back to Germany. The Soviets were happy to return them to their parents, but wanted the parents to come to the home where the children were lodged, as they wanted them “really to understand that the children have had good care.” But the émigrés were afraid to go to the Russian Zone, so the children, who “sang Russian songs quite lustily most of the time” on the train, were instead brought to the DP camp where their parents were living and handed over in a little ceremony “carried out with dignity and restraint.” Each family was called in turn and requested to “sign a paper stating that they had received their children and that they were in good condition. Each parent was asked to write a statement of appreciation on the back of the form.” Only one refused. The UNRRA observers, who had expected all sorts of propaganda and unpleasantness, reported with some amazement that
the Soviet officers “were sympathetic and courteous” with their former countrymen.
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