Teens in Transit: Minor Refugees from Nazi-Occupied Europe in New York

This paper focuses on the minor and mostly unaccompanied refugees fleeing Nazi persecution arriving in the late 1930s/early 1940s in New York. In particular, it explores the agency of the young refugees but also processes of knowledge production about and by them. These children were confronted with different transit situations: many of them fled from one country to another within changing political discourses and bureaucratic frameworks; while being confronted with the absence of their family growing up as teenagers and experiencing life transition in general. In addition to their changing personal identities, they had to adjust to different and partially changing conceptions of childhood, promoted especially by teachers, social workers, or even other refugees after their arrival in the US.

The paper is based on sources produced by pedagogues and social scientists who also arrived as refugees in New York at the same time. Some of them were specifically interested in this group of minor refugees – in their experiences, but also in the bodies of knowledge they created during and after flight. Especially at the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University, a group of refugees from Austria and Germany started research and collected data in the form of questionnaires and, in some cases, follow-up surveys after 1945. This material gives specific insight into the transit situation of a group of young refugees and allows their voices to be heard – one 1943 survey, for example, included 214 refugee children in New York – simultaneously revealing how people in transit themselves thought about this specific group. Contextualized within the debates about “Americanization” and assimilation, this paper delivers perspectives on early refugee research in history and the discourses related to them, which mainly focused on finding ways to end the transit situation for these refugee children.