“Suffer Little Children”: Rememorializing Child Rescue

Why was there no American Kindertransport from Europe before or during World War II? How do we reconcile that question with the more than 8,000 registered “unaccompanied children” (including more than a thousand Jewish children, and dozens of children of Spanish Republicans) who arrived in the United States between 1933 and 1945? This paper will explore the history of prewar and wartime child rescue movements in the United States, and how these efforts have been both commemorated and misremembered by the public and the scholarly community. The failed 1939 legislative effort to bring up to 20,000 German children to the United States (the Wagner-Rogers Bill) has dominated the memory of Holocaust-era child rescue in this country, obscuring the work of organizations including German-Jewish Children’s Aid, the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, and the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, and individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Clarence Pickett, Marion Kenworthy, and Marshall Field. The State Department, which has become the target of much public and scholarly criticism for its restrictive interpretation of immigration laws, played a vital role in an effort to save 5,000 Jewish children from unoccupied France in 1942, which, while it failed due to the war’s progress, has never been properly evaluated. A well-intentioned effort in the early 2000s to recast and flatten the experiences of these unaccompanied children into a singular narrative further obscured the efforts of activists and relief groups and the complicated, changing situation they faced.