Les déplacements temporaires d’enfants déshérités en Europe centrale pendant la première guerre mondiale.

Abstract

Much has been written and told about the child transports, the well-known Kindertransporte, related to the Nazi period and World War II. Yet, astonishingly little is known about the child transports related to Europe’s First World War. This article is aiming to fill this research gap on the historical landscape, telling the history of child transports during and after WWI from and across Central Europe. These child transports were originally meant to provide short-term relief, but they sometimes even resulted in children’s long-term placement abroad. The organizations’ and birth families’ primary interest in the child transports was to improve children’s physical well-being, ignoring their subjectivity to a great extent. The physical appearance of a child’s body, namely its underweight, sickness, or malnutrition was conditional for the participation in the child transports of the time. Visual imagery, including drawings, photography posters and everyday objects, were essential to justify, illustrate, and document children’s suffering and their geographic displacement. Paying special attention to the visual dimension of this particular relief activity, this article will uncover the transformation of early twentieth century child transports from the late Austro-Hungarian Empire to Europe’s humanitarian-internationalist post-WWI era.