by Zoë Pollock
Adam Kirsch reviews Tara Zahra's new book The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families After World War II. There were 175,000 Jewish children who survived, from a prewar population of 1.5 million:
[M]any Jewish activists argued that it was both psychologically and politically better to place surviving children in group homes or kibbutzim, where the education on offer was frankly Zionist. Zahra quotes one Jewish teacher defending this practice: “Indoctrination may not be good for normal children in normal surroundings. But what is normal here? … In the end, Zahra writes, “many UN workers and American authorities came to embrace the Zionist solution for Jewish refugee children.” They were persuaded by the kind of harsh, irrefutable logic another Zionist teacher employed: “The children have nothing, nothing. What should we talk about—the blessings of Poland? They know them. Or the visas for America? They can’t get them. The map of Eretz [Israel] is their salvation.”
The Dish 