Cold War, Warm Embrace: The United States and the Ultimate Admission of Europe’s Displaced Orphans, 1945–52

This paper explores the resettlement of displaced orphans in the United States in the aftermath of World War II through the eyes of one displaced orphan, Emilie Kovačič from Yugoslavia. Emilie was one of 3,047 displaced orphans settled in the United States between 1948 and 1951, though both she and her Austrian foster family fiercely fought against her resettlement. I argue that by looking to this case study, we can see the political battles that played out at multiple registers over the meaning of childhood, family, and nationality between Emilie’s foster family and social workers at one end, and between nation states at the other. These highly contested and politicized conceptions of what type of family, and by extension, what nation could meet the ‘best interest of the child’ sat at the heart of what on the surface appeared to be a humanitarian effort to care for Europe’s war orphans. By using Emilie’s story, I aim to bring the voices and experiences of the children at the center of foster care and adoptive transactions back into the historical record. I demonstrate the symbolic importance of children to US foreign policy, looking to this particular chapter as a turning point in which a temporary system of foster care soon hardened into a permanent and international system of international adoption.