Child Withholding as Child Transfer: Hidden Jewish Children and the State in Postwar Netherlands

Abstract

The children's rights movement has led, among other things, to a focus by human rights scholars on nationally orchestrated child kidnapping, known euphemistically as “child transfer.” This article will focus on a little known case that I will argue can be considered child transfer, that of Jewish orphans in the Netherlands after World War II. Kidnapping these children was not initially involved in their movement from parents’ to strangers’ homes; however, after the war, the State often refused to return some of these children to surviving Jewish kin or to the Jewish community. In other words, against the wishes of the decimated Jewish community after the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the postwar Netherlands government withheld Jewish children from their kin and from their ethnic community, keeping them in Gentile homes. I argue that this child withholding constitutes a form of child transfer because of the manner in which it was done and the reasoning behind it.

Notes

1. The range of estimates is from 20,000 to as many as 28,000 but historian Bob Moore cites a number of recent studies that suggest 25,000 is closer to the correct number. Sixteen thousand to 17,000 were estimated to have survived of whom 4,000 were children (Moore 1997: 146).

2. In their postwar effort not to discriminate and to treat everyone the same, the Dutch government ended up interpreting this ideology in a perverse manner. While Resistance workers were privileged and received the first benefits, the government did not extend any special help to Dutch Jews. Having lost their property, wealth, livelihoods, home, and, in most cases, their families, Dutch Jews were the most bereft group in postwar Holland. By not acknowledging that Jews may have needed a little more help due to the Nazis singling them out for genocide, the Dutch government willfully turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering.

3. He explains that by 1967, 264 Jewish orphans from the Netherlands had immigrated to Israel with the help of Le Ezrat Ha-Yeled, two of whom were in my study.