Refuge in Great Britain

Title

Refuge in Great Britain

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Although a relatively small number compared to the deaths during the holocaust, more than twelve thousand unaccompanied children from central Europe took refuge in Great Britain or the United States between the years of 1934 and 1945. Great Britain took the majority of the refuge children with more than eleven thousand accounted for entering the British Isles. In 1936 an organization called the Children's Inter-Aid Committee was founded during the year of 1936 with the sole purpose to bring Jewish and non-Aryan Christian children to Britain. A few years later, this organization merged with another organization that focused on the care of children and through this the Refugee Children's Movement(RCM) was born. The purpose had not shifted from prior the Children's Inter-Aid Committee, however instead the RCM became more proactive and arranged different instances to help the child's welfare. For example, arranged for safe meetings when the child arrived in England as well as inspecting the child's accommodations such as the quality of the house or hostel they would be staying at. A year after the merge, the British government mandated that a guarantee of 50 British pounds is to be paid if any refugee henceforth was to come into the country. This monetary requirement made it difficult for the RCM to raise enough to secure each child's refuge without private guarantors.(1) Those children that entered Britain were labeled transmigrants, essentially that means after the war, there is no intention of the children remaining in Britain. Conversely in the United States (U.S.) these children would only be permitted to enter the country if they were legal immigrants and were expected to stay in the U.S. These two terms would help to perpetuate the differences in the way these children were treated. Although both countries had different ways to do things, the organizations designed to handle the Jewish and non-Aryan Christians made sure to have stern requirements in order for a foster home to take in a child. Two examples are, that the child must have their own tooth brush and a guarantee they would not be used for menial labor. The foster care process between the countries were also different, in Britain, the child would first be placed in a hostel, in the U.S. a refugee already had a home picked in advance for the child and if that child was Jewish, the U.S. organization made sure they would be placed in a Jewish family's home. The U.S. organization the German Jewish Children's Aid (GJCA) received allocated money from the social welfare agencies to help cover the costs which included housing and feeding the children. Post war children in the U.S. rarely returned to continental Europe, instead a small number of the children that took refuge in U.S. met up with family members who survived the Holocaust. This all , was starkly different in Britain. At age sixteen, both boys and girls were expected to find a job after they quit education. Oddly enough those transmigrants of Britain were more immigrants where their stay would be much longer than anticipated.

Date Added
April 22, 2014
Item Type
Website
Citation
“Refuge in Great Britain,” Delivered From Evil, accessed April 29, 2024, https://deliveredfromevil.omeka.net/items/show/6.