Wartime Evacuation Research Articles

Peculiarities of Work by Children and Teenagers in the Process of Forced Evacuation During the War: The Adventures of Little Princes and Princesses

This article describes the experience of working with children and adolescents during wartime evacuation. The author examines the different reactions of children to war and forced resettlement, aiming for a comprehensive understanding of the evacuation process. The essay presents models of reactions to traumatic experiences, distinguishing between pathological and normal responses to traumatic stress. These models assist practicing psychotherapists in navigating the spectrum of patient reactions and in selecting the most effective treatments. The author discusses the unique aspects of working with children and adolescents during evacuation, identifying factors and methods that facilitate this process.

City, Community and Sport in Birmingham during the Second World War

ABSTRACT While transnational, global and imperial studies of the Second World War have added to established national frameworks, the analysis of local and regional perspectives remains limited. This article examines the importance of local belonging and community identity during wartime through the case study of sporting activity in Birmingham. In a city where social disruption was particularly high due to the impact of changes in wartime production, bombing and evacuation, sport offered a reassuring sense of comfort and familiarity. While some clubs disappeared and events declined in frequency, sport nonetheless survived, and in some cases thrived, thanks to the activity of active councillors, sports administrators, club officials and the support of the local press. This article argues that the city’s ability to maintain a relatively stable and vibrant civic sporting culture during an unprecedented period of population movement and social upheaval buttressed a sense of community identity, which acted as a starting-point for the articulation of wartime citizenship and patriotism.

Eisenstein in Fergana: from avant-garde to national form

ABSTRACT Sergei Eisenstein’s work on The Great Fergana Canal in 1939 and his subsequent wartime evacuation to Kazakhstan gave him the opportunity to reflect on Stalin’s famous definition of proletarian culture as ‘national in form, socialist in content’. The modernist cult of difficult forms endured a radical reformulation through the 1930s. The insistence on clarity and accessibility, fuelled by the emergence of the Socialist Realist style, made aesthetic intricacy unacceptable and dramatically reshaped acceptable practices of perception and expression. But the ‘strangeness’ of the Orient allowed the modernist valorisation of defamiliarized forms to continue its existence in new ways. The ‘national in form, socialist in content’ formula provided a context in which formal strangeness could re-emerge as a sanctioned entity. Formal experimentation was possible only in the national context, and only if singular socialist content predominated. As such, national form was the last sanctuary of modernist strangeness. By utilising this formula, the late modernist Eisenstein concerned himself with creating national building blocks for the socialist edifice, which was, in turn, intended to evolve into a supranational construct.

Joseph BrodskySelected Poems, 1968–1996Joseph BrodskyLess Than OneJoseph BrodskyOn Grief and Reason

ostensibly referring to his lack of preparation for graduate school, for Wallace, it is a code for his lack of whiteness. Over the course of the weekend, Wallace begins a sexual liaison with his friend Miller, who insists that he is straight but is equally attracted to Wallace. In the course of their intimacy both Wallace and Miller reveal their traumatic pasts: Wallace’s early experience of sexual molestation, the deep-seated homophobia and abandonment by his parents , and Miller’s history of violent rage. The novel ends with profound uncertainty for Wallace and his future. The last chapter is a throwback to the innocent optimism of his early days in Madison, a day spent sailing on the lake and gathering by a bonfire to toast to their new life. For Wallace, the allure of this life of the mind and a place to fashion his own identity is still haunting. There are moments of genuine community, as with Wallace’s friendship with Brigit, but on the whole Taylor portrays the continuing marginality of Black queer lives in institutions of academic prestige. Lopamudra Basu University of Wisconsin–Stout Ayfer Tunç The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse Trans. Feyza Howell. London. Istros Books. 2020. 372 pages. IMAGINE A LARGE building facing the rough waters of the Black Sea: a mental health hospital. Now imagine that same large building not quite facing the rough waters of the Black Sea, because there are no windows on the side that overlooks the actual sea. Such absurdity, which is very much reminiscent of the mentality humorously related to that particular region in Turkey, is key to the narrative of The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse . With its back turned to the Black Sea, “evok[ing] an immediate and inexplicable sense of resentment,” this mental hospital in northern Turkey is the starting point of “the highly unreliable,” quite enjoyable, and rhythmically fast-paced account of the country. As the threads of the narrative weave in and out and stitch the stories of its many characters together, the omniscient narrator’s gaze travels through various cities and towns and moves back and forth in time. Yet it always comes back to the madhouse only to set out again on another narrative tangent. The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse represents the “human landscapes” of Ayfer Tunç’s Turkey, not quite the romantic epic that Nâzım Hikmet’s magnum opus is, but in style and tone, very much fitting her milieu and zeitgeist the way Hikmet’s did his own era. The novel opens on Valentine’s Day with the introduction of the first character, Ülkü Birinci, “an associate professor of psychology at an undistinguished private Istanbul university,” about to give a lecture entitled “Love: Self-sacrifice or Self-preservation?” at the hospital’s conference hall. While this opening is suggestive of a campus-novel storyline, it soon becomes clear that the narrative not only crosses time and space Books in Review JOSEPH BRODSKY Joseph Brodsky Selected Poems, 1968–1996 New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 174 pages. Less Than One New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020 (©1986). 501 pages. On Grief and Reason New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020 (©1995). 484 pages. THE REISSUE THIS YEAR of a number of Joseph Brodsky’s works, to coincide with what would have been his eightieth birthday, could not have come at a more critical time. Before Brodsky’s arrival in the United States in 1972, the poet had passed through many of the shadowy depths that the twentieth century had to offer: wartime evacuation from Leningrad under the siege; arrests and forced “treatments” in Russian psychiatric wards; surveillance and harassment by the KGB; and transport in a prison train (the infamous Stolypin boxcar) on his way to internal exile after a trial based on trumped-up charges for “parasitism.” Due to the courageous efforts of friends, such as the journalist Frida Vigdorova, who compiled a transcript of his trial proceedings that was circulated abroad, his case became known in the West, which facilitated his release from internal exile and, six years later, his...

«Путь к Победе»: новый сборник документов архивистов Челябинской области по истории эвакуации

The article reviews the documents collection “The Path to Victory. Evacuation of industrial enterprises to the Chelyabinsk region during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45,” dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Victory. The book provides information about the enterprises evacuated to the Chelyabinsk region. The book structure is analyzed. The publication begins with a historiographic overview presenting the context for the history of wartime evacuation, its causes, scope, mechanisms, difficulties, and results. Besides the historiographic review, the collection contains two major documentary sections. The first one includes articles on departments evacuated to Chelyabinsk and on heads of the People’s Commissariats. The second section contains articles on enterprises relocated to the region. It includes bibliographic reference with data on the leaders of the Chelyabinsk region and employees of industrial enterprises. Each section contains unique archival documents from the fonds of the United State Archive of the Chelyabinsk Region (OGAChO). The collection is complemented by memoirs and photographic documents representing a comprehensive impression of the era. The review concludes that the collection is of great practical importance. The collection of historical documents prepared by the OGAChO team reconstructs the complex evacuation process and provides an incentive for further study of the economic history of Russia during the Great Patriotic War.

Researching War-time Evacuation with Belmont Primary School Children

The Lancashire village of Belmont was created at the start of the nineteenth century to house workers for the bleaching and dyeing works built by industrialist Thomas Ryecroft and landowner Rev. Charles Wright. By the 1930s it had been incorporated into Turton Urban District and although very much rural still functioned as an industrial village. The 1939 National Register records that the majority of the population was working in the local bleach works or paper mill with just 10% farmers or workers on the land. It had a tiny school with just 75 pupils, which was more than doubled in size by the arrival of 80 infants from Temple School, Manchester in September 1939. This was Belmont’s quota of Turton’s allocation of 1,600 evacuees. Today the village is technically part of Blackburn with Darwen, and the parish consists of around 300 homes. It has a lively primary school with a good reputation for supporting pupils with disabilities and high-quality work in the Arts.

‘For me, St Paul’s would always be among the pine trees of Berkshire’: English public schools and wartime evacuation (1939-45)

ABSTRACT This article considers the wartime evacuation of English public schools as a result of enemy bombing as well as the commandeering of school buildings for government and military purposes. It looks at the way evacuation was privately organised by public school authorities often relying on the ‘old school tie’, while also taking financial considerations into account in the case of schools faced with sharp declines in their numbers in the 1930s context. The article also focuses on the way evacuation challenged public schools’ sense of elective belonging and corporate identity while making it possible to establish new contacts with state schools and refugees from continental Europe. It finally assesses the legacy of public schools’ evacuation journeys as the institutions returned to their historic sites at the end of the war, hoping to preserve the more practical spirit of the evacuation years, at the time of the Butler Education Act and the building of the Welfare State.

The Evacuation Policy of the Soviet Union During the Second World War

ABSTRACT Based on an analysis of state documents, this article analyzes the features of the evacuation policy of the Soviet government during the Second World War, using the example of the Kazakh SSR. It is shown that material resources were of primary importance, and human resources — even those people who would have been of use to the war economy and the nomenklatura — were of secondary importance in the wartime evacuation policy of the Soviet state. On the basis of declassified archive sources, the article shows that the evacuation policy of the Soviet government on the whole reflected the social hierarchy that had developed and the system of privileges of the Soviet state. The families of the nomenklatura and the higher leadership personnel were in a more favored position, regardless of their personal labor contribution. The article examines the specific features of the material and everyday services, medical and sanitation services, and social support of the people evacuated to Kazakhstan. The difficulties and problems the evacuees faced with respect to resettlement, conditioned by the catastrophic shortage of material resources, food, and industrial goods, are also examined.

Museum Director: Job, Profession, or…? A Hundred-Year Long Experience of Directorship at the Peterhof State Museum-Reserve

When studying the history of museum work, modern cultural scholars have not paid enough attention to the issues of museum management, which are of great importance for every museum. The museum consisting of the palaces and parks of Peterhof, established after the nationalization of the imperial residence in 1918, were initially headed by a curator and later by a director. The director determined museum policy, organized scientific, conservation, financial and economic work, and maintained contacts with government officials. In the early stages of the museum’s development, the director’s responsibilities included organization of educational work, inventory of palace collections, and preservation of architectural monuments. Later on, the area of responsibilities expanded and changed to keep up with the historical process. Workers of culture and people with a more democratic background held the director’s position. Numerous Party bureaucrats later gained the position, and during the last stage historians with a special education served as directors. Having gone through the transformation of palaces and museums into “museums of noble life”, the conversion of historical landscapes into parks of “culture and recreation”, through the tragedy of political repressions and wartime evacuation, through the difficulties of the post-war revival of the complex and many other things, the directors of the Peterhof museum created an amazing historical and cultural phenomenon known all over the world today.

Klaus Friedrich Roth, 1925-2015

Klaus Friedrich Roth, 1925-2015

Forced emigration and desired return: the social and psychological consequences of the wartime evacuation of Greeks

The subject of this article is the fate of the Greek political refugees – specifically personsforcibly resettled in Poland and other countries of the Soviet Bloc, evacuated from territoriesengrossed in the Civil War of 1946-1949. After a long period in exile, some returned to theirhome country and began a new life, struggling with economic, familial, social, linguistic and cultural problems. The history of the Greek refugees and their re-immigration illustrates the irreversibility and irreparability of the social and psychological damage done by forcedmigration. Returns to the homeland did not reinstate balance, and did not ease the dilemmasinitiated by the first resettlement. History is stuck in the memories as well as the everyday lives of the return migrants and their social milieus; this creates divides, mutual strangeness, and social tensions. Compulsory movement of populations – leading to the severance of connections with one’s fatherland, hometown, mother tongue, and home culture – causes subsequent conflicts and identity problems which continue to haunt those who returned to their birthplace.

A Controversial Dam in Stalinist Central Asia: Rivalry and "Fraternal Cooperation" on the Syr Darya

The article tells the story of debates preceding the construction of the Kairakkum dam in Tajikistan in 1956. In the second half of the 1940s, Uzbek and Tajik party leaders competed over the location of the new hydropower plant. Neither side wanted it to be built in their own republic. Eventually, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic became the construction site, which could be viewed as an indirect indicator of its subordinated position in the late Stalinist Soviet hierarchy compared to the Uzbek Republic, which became industrialized after massive wartime evacuation of factories from the European part of the country. Roberts restores the historical subjectivity of republican elites, who, even during high Stalinism, could object to Moscow's plans (with varying success) and advance their own visions of the region's development.

Au Revoir les Enfants: Wartime Evacuation and the Politics of Childhood in France and Britain, 1939–45

Few people in France today remember the wartime evacuation of children from Paris. But in 1938–40, the evacuation of urban schoolchildren and other ‘useless mouths’ from likely targets of bombing was central to French plans for the ‘passive defence’ of the civilian population. Moreover, the size and duration of such large-scale child migration schemes increased after the defeat and Occupation, as (allied) bombing raids over industrial cities like Ivry-sur-Seine or Boulogne-Billancourt put their children at risk once again. Why did an event so important in British memories of the Second World War leave so little trace in public memories of the war in France? This article explores the public debates around wartime evacuation respectively in Britain and in France and the convictions about relationships between families, children and the state that underpinned them’ For these debates suggest two very different ways of understanding the nature and needs of children in mid twentieth-century Europe and the relationship of those needs to understandings of children's present or future citizenship.

Operation Pied Piper: a geographical reappraisal of the impact of wartime evacuation on scarlet fever and diphtheria rates in England and Wales, 1939-1945.

This paper examines the geographical impact of the British Government's wartime evacuation scheme on notified rates of two common acute childhood diseases (scarlet fever and diphtheria) in the 1470 local government districts of England and Wales, 1939-1945. Drawing on the notifications of communicable diseases collated by the General Register Office (GRO), we establish pre-war (baseline) disease rates for the 1470 districts. For the war years, techniques of binary logistic regression analysis are used to assess the associations between (a) above-baseline ('raised') disease rates in evacuation, neutral and reception districts and (b) the major phases of the evacuation scheme. The analysis demonstrates that the evacuation was temporally associated with distinct national and regional effects on notified levels of disease activity. These effects were most pronounced in the early years of the dispersal (1939-1941) and corresponded with initial levels of evacuation-related population change at the regional and district scales.

Ratna evakuacija i pregled zaštitnih radova na pokretnom inventaru iz župne crkve sv. Ladislava u Pokupskom

Ratna evakuacija i pregled zaštitnih radova na pokretnom inventaru iz župne crkve sv. Ladislava u Pokupskom

Long-term influences of childhood history and educational level on authoritarianism.

This study on authoritarianism is based on a survey of 900 respondents recruited originally to investigate the long-term effects of wartime evacuation on children from the County of Kent in England during World War II (Rusby, 2005). Following the psychoanalytic premise of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) this sample was used to test whether this childhood experience of apparent rejection by parents might be associated with scores on the F-scale and its nine subscales measured 50 years later. Variables related to home upbringing and the life course were included in the univariate and structural modeling analyses. The main effect of evacuation found was an inverse relationship with authoritarianism for males with the number of billets occupied. Females who had experienced a strict home upbringing had significantly higher scores on certain subscales. The analyses found a highly significant inverse relationship between the F-scale mean, and all nine subscales, with level of education. This contribution of the subsyndromes to authoritarianism was confirmed by factor analysis. The implications of the results for the psychoanalytic premise of authoritarianism are discussed.

Enquiry Skills in History: The Blitz and Evacuation

The aim of this article is to suggest the inclusion of the topic ‘The Blitz during World War Two’ as part of the curriculum in British primary and secondary schools with a view to developing enquiry skills in History. In writing the article, extensive use has been made of not only textbooks and secondary sources but also propaganda films, documentaries featuring primary sources in the form of first-hand accounts from people living at the time and web-based materials. From 1939 until 1945 the British population as a society was inescapably and deeply involved and immersed in one of the most significant events in British history, the Second World War. The concepts of change and continuity, cause and effect, time and historical sequence are all applicable to this topic but the purpose of this article is to determine through analysis of a variety of historical evidence whether or not the experience of wartime evacuation really created a sense of uniformity and solidarity in Britain. By doing this, it will become evident that studying aspects of the domestic consequences of the Blitz during World War Two is an effective method of developing enquiry skills in History.

MILIEU SOCIAL OR MILIEU FAMILIAL? THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CHILDREARING AMONG THE POPULAR CLASSES IN 20TH-CENTURY FRANCE AND BRITAIN: THE CASE OF EVACUATION (1939-45)

This article addresses wide questions about the different attitudes towards childhood in Britain and France in the 20th century. Focusing initially on the so-called Colonies de Vacances in France, the article shows that urban working-class French parents had, as early as the I900s, got used to the idea of sending their children off for lengthy periods of time in the summer months to special camps in the French countryside. The development of the Colonies is reviewed and the consequent attitudes towards childhood compared to that in Britain, where wartime evacuation led to vocal and insistent concerns over the separation of children and their families. No such concerns were voiced in France, and the article attempts to unpick what such differences tell us about attitudes towards and experiences of childhood.

Childhood leukaemia incidence and the population mixing hypothesis in US SEER data

Sir, We read with interest the paper by Wartenberg et al (2004) using the US SEER data, to examine the population mixing hypothesis in relation to the aetiology of childhood leukaemia. We have previously examined this issue in the UK using ecologic (Parslow et al, 2002) and case–control (Law et al, 2003) methodology. In their paper, Wartenberg and colleagues suggest that our ecologic study (Parslow et al, 2002) was of a similar type, and obtained similar results to those of Kinlen (1995). Unfortunately, this is not the case and our findings have been misinterpreted. Firstly, our study design and methodology are different: Kinlen has found increased incidence of childhood leukaemia in areas that had unusually high levels of population movements, principally involving unusual sociodemographic events such as wartime evacuation (Kinlen and John, 1994) in relatively small populations. In contrast, our studies have used large populations determined a priori (either Great Britain as a whole or Yorkshire) and have not selected rural areas with sudden increases in population mixing (e.g. Kinlen and John, 1994; Kinlen, 1995). Secondly, our investigations have used a well-defined, reproducible measure of population mixing. In addition, our exposure of interest, that is, population mixing, was derived from independently collected data sources. Our measure of population mixing is more comprehensive in comparison to crude changes in the size of a population as it includes an index of the diversity of inwards migration. The role of the diversity of migrants may contribute to the impact of population mixing on the level of circulating infections (Rhodes and Anderson, 1996). Thirdly, our results indicate that high levels of population mixing confer a protective effect for childhood leukaemia (Parslow et al, 2002; Law et al, 2003). We have suggested that this may be due to early establishment of immunocompetence in areas of high population mixing and would support the second step in the delayed infection hypothesis (Greaves, 1997). This proposes that common-ALL is an unusual response to a common infection, following an initial chromosome translocation event in utero, as a result of limited exposure to childhood infections. This misinterpretation of our study is not surprising: a plethora of papers exist in the literature that address the ‘population mixing hypothesis'. The definition of population mixing appears to vary by each investigation. Further research testing this hypothesis should provide a clear definition of the population mixing measure used.

Martha May Eliot: “Spinster in Steel Specs, Adviser on Maternity”

PEDIATRICIAN MARTHA MAY ELIOT was associated with the Children’s Bureau for over 20 years. When criticizing her role and the influence of the Children’s Bureau, and even when noting Eliot’s remarkable achievements, commentators frequently questioned her authority as an “unmarried expert” on child health. Despite the rather hostile environment in which she worked, Eliot went on to receive many well-deserved honors. The American Pediatric Society gave her its highest award, the John Howland Medal, in 1967. Martha May Eliot was born in Dorchester, Mass, in 1891, to Christopher Rhodes Eliot, a Unitarian minister, and Mary Jackson May. She was a first cousin of the poet T. S. Eliot. Her grandfather, William G. Eliot, was the first chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. Eliot majored in classical literature at Radcliffe College and also completed premedical training. During a year’s study at Bryn Mawr College she met Ethel Collins Dunham, who was to become her life partner.1 After completing their undergraduate education, the two enrolled at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1914. Eliot and Dunham planned to take medical internships together, but only Dunham was accepted at Hopkins, making her the first female intern in the Pediatrics Department. The department chair, John Howland, refused to admit more than one woman. Eliot instead went to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston, and then completed a residency in pediatrics at St. Louis Children’s Hospital from 1919 to 1920.2 Figure 1 In 1921, Eliot was invited to become the first chief resident in Edwards A. Park’s new Department of Pediatrics at Yale Medical School, working at New Haven Hospital. In 1924, she was named director of the Children’s Bureau’s Division of Child and Maternal Health. Park encouraged her to commute to Washington for one week a month while continuing her duties at New Haven. Eliot and Park also began a 3-year study of the prevention of rickets and presented their preliminary results, excerpted in this selection, to the American Medical Association in 1925. As a result of this study, they recommended cod-liver oil and sunlight as effective measures to prevent this deforming disease of childhood. As a consequence, rickets, once prevalent, became much less common in America. When Eliot was appointed assistant chief of the Children’s Bureau in 1934, she moved to Washington full-time, and a year later left her position as associate professor at Yale Medical School. Dunham also joined the bureau in 1935, as director of child development.2(p 174) During World War II, Eliot traveled to England to study the impact of wartime evacuation on young children. She published her report Civil Defense Measures for the Protection of Children in 1942. She was also a leading figure in war work at home and ran the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program, providing medical assistance to the families of 1.5 million American soldiers. Eliot received the Lasker Award for this work in 1948. After World War II, Eliot served on the US delegation to the first-ever World Health Assembly, and she was the only woman to sign the founding document of the World Health Organization (WHO). In 1949, she moved to Geneva to serve as assistant director general of the WHO. As one of few women ever to hold such high office in a public health agency, she faced intense scrutiny of her professional qualifications as well as her personal circumstances; a newspaper headline announcing the appointment described her as a “spinster in steel specs, adviser on maternity.”3(p 25) Two years later, she returned to the Children’s Bureau as its chief. Eliot left the Children’s Bureau in 1956, and in 1957 she became chair of the Department of Child and Maternal Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. After retiring in 1960, she continued her work for the WHO and UNICEF, reporting on medical education in Asia and Africa. In 1947, she was the first woman to be elected president of the American Public Health Association (APHA). In 1964, the APHA established the Martha May Eliot Award to recognize outstanding achievements in the field of maternal and child health care. Eliot died in Cambridge, Mass, on February 14, 1978, nine years after the death of her partner.