Rehabilitating Children: Lithuania and International Humanitarian Aid, 1918–1923

Abstract

At the end of World War I, the material destruction, persistent shortages, and repatriation flows from Russia made the issue of orphans and abandoned and indigent children more urgent every day. While the internationalization of humanitarian intervention and international humanitarian actors’ focus on childhood helped Lithuanian institutions partially cope with children’s relief, both the international/foreign humanitarian organizations (the American Red Cross, the American Relief Administration, and the Lady Paget Mission) and the national ones looked at aid not simply as a means to temporarily alleviate children’s suffering, but as an example to encourage the establishment of new long-term practices and ultimately forge new citizens out of poor children. Even if international child rehabilitation projects endeavored to deliver aid according to the perceived countries’ social situation and vulnerability in the anti-Bolshevik front, different approaches undermined cooperation and fueled widespread and reciprocal suspicions.