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ABSTRACT
The displaced children of Europe, who live in and through landscapes and in temporary accommodations—their bare worlds of life stuffed into rucksacks—are our constant companions, their movement and immobility paraded as a geopolitical inconvenience and security threat to governments and officials even before they embark on treacherous Mediterranean sea and land crossings to hoped-for asylum in Europe. Gigliotti examines the humanitarian ambitions and changing narrative authority in the coverage of displaced children in the photography of David ‘Chim’ Seymour, notably from his UNICEF/UNESCO-commissioned tour of Europe in the summer of 1948 and, briefly, in UNICEF’s online platform, ‘Refugees in Europe: Then and Now’. She outlines the post-war historical context of internationalism and humanitarian engagement with the visual to advocate for displaced children’s rights to place, home and belonging, and concludes with an analysis of the representation of the post-war refugee and displaced person as a memory emissary in today’s refugee crises.
I would like to thank Dan Stone and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which improved the article, and Ben Shneiderman from the CHIM Archive in New York and staff at Magnum Photos in London for helping me to gain access to and reprint the photographs. I am grateful to the Research Committee in the Department of History and the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, for providing funds to cover their reproduction.
Notes
1 ‘The children of Europe: a UNESCO photo story’, UNESCO Courier, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1949, 1, 5–9, available on the UNESCO website at https://en.unesco.org/courier/children-europe-unesco-photo-story. Readers are advised to visit David ‘Chim’ Seymour’s large collection of photos, some of which I make reference to later in the article, in David Seymour, ‘Europe. 1948. Children of post-war Europe’, available on the Magnum Photos website at https://pro.magnumphotos.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2K7O3R1P0IZ1&PN=1. For a shorter visual essay of thirteen photos, see ‘Children of Europe: David Seymour’s post-war document’, available on the Magnum Photos website at www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/david-seymour-children-of-europe/ (all websites viewed 15 March 2018).
2 ‘The children of Europe’, 6.
3 Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
4 ‘The children of Europe’ and ‘Europe. 1948’.
5 UNICEF, ‘Refugees in Europe: then and now’, 24 December 2015, available on the Medium: Photography and Social Change website at https://medium.com/photography-and-social-change/refugees-in-europe-then-and-now-1f71790c8d83#.qux6s836i (viewed 15 March 2018).
6 See the catalogue on the Odyssee Europa website at http://odyssee-europa.net/#fourth; and the Magnum Photos repository of photos from its archive curated as ‘Odyssey Europe: exile and refuge since 1945’, available on the Magnum Photos website at http://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=24PV7C0WHQL (both web sites viewed 15 March 2018).
7 See Anna Lipphardt, ‘Communities on the move: reconsidering the history of East European Jews after the Holocaust from a landsmanshaftn perspective’, East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 44, no. 2–3, 2014, 225–40.
8 See ‘We went back: photographs from Europe, 1933–1956’ by Chim, press release, [January 2013], available on the International Center of Photography website at www.icp.org/files/exhibition/credits/sites/default/files/exhibition_pdfs/icp_chim_wewentback_press_0.pdf (viewed 15 March 2018).
9 See ‘Chim CV’, available on the Chim Archive website at http://archive.davidseymour.com/docs_page48.html; and Carole Naggar, ‘Chim’s children’, working paper, available on the Hadassah Brandeis Institute website at www.brandeis.edu/hbi/childrenholocaust/workingpapers/naggar.pdf (both websites viewed 15 March 2018).
10 Dan Kaufman, ‘A secret archive: on the Mexican suitcase’, The Nation, 24 January 2011, 31–4 (31).
11 See the profile of Robert Capa on the Magnum Photos website at http://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_9_VForm&ERID=24KL535353 (viewed 15 March 2018).
12 Kaufman, ‘A secret archive’, 32.
13 Holland Cotter, ‘Images of war, finally unpacked’, New York Times, 24 September 2010.
14 See ‘The Mexican suitcase’ touring exhibition curated by Cynthia Young on the International Center of Photography website at www.icp.org/exhibitions/the-mexican-suitcase-traveling-exhibition (viewed 15 March 2018).
15 The Mexican Suitcase/La Maleta mexicana, dir. Trisha Ziff, 2011. Readers can view some of the photographs in the film’s trailer, available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wV4yx6rXL4 (viewed 15 March 2018).
16 Cotter, ‘Images of war, finally unpacked’.
17 Ibid.
18 For the image (Reference PAR72756), see the Magnum Photos website at http://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDI7MJPO.html (viewed 15 March 2018).
19 Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1989), 87.
20 Ibid., 92–3.
21 Tara Zahra, ‘Lost children: displacement, family, and nation in postwar Europe’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 81, no. 1, 2009, 45–86 (46). See also her book, Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2011).
22 Zahra, ‘Lost children’, 46.
23 Thérèse Bonney, Europe's Children (New York: Plantin Press 1943). The book contained 62 photographs.
24 See the review of Europe’s Children, ‘Suffering children’, Time Magazine, 6 December 1943. The children in the book were described as ‘incredibly beautiful, the maturity and purpose on their pondering faces giving to the photographs the wild quality of early Christian art’.
25 Dorothy Macardle, quoted in Wyman, DPs, 89. In 1951, Macardle, the Irish writer, humanitarian activist and historian, also published a book of the same name as Chim’s, Children of Europe, in which she commented that the effects of war were ‘immeasurable’, citing psychological damage, and loss of hope and faith in life.
26 See Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2005), 29–33 (‘The GI and the DP: The Search’). Bonney served as critical advisor on The Search.
27 Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, ‘“A horrific photo of a drowned Syrian child”: humanitarian photography and NGO media strategies in historical perspective’, International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 97, 2015, 1121–55 (1121).
28 Ibid., 1124.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 1126.
31 Wyman, DPs, 88.
32 The fate of children was much debated between military authorities, German foster parents, social workers, Jewish agencies, East European Communist officials and displaced persons themselves. These debates were linked to emerging ideals of human rights, the family, democracy, child welfare and the reconstruction of European civilization in general. In the words of Vinita A. Lewis, an officer with the International Refugee Organization in Germany, ‘The lost identity of individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of Europe’, quoted in Zahra, ‘Lost children’, 3.
33 Bill Churchill, quoted in ‘Letter from Dita Camalcho, Time Life International, 13 April 1948, available on the Chim Archive website at http://archive.davidseymour.com/press_page11.html (viewed 15 March 2018).
34 Naggar, ‘Chim’s children’, 10.
35 Ibid., 9.
36 ‘The children of Europe’; see also Tom Allbeson, ‘Photographic diplomacy in the postwar world: UNESCO and the conception of photography as a universal language, 1946–1956’, Modern Intellectual History, vol. 12, no. 2, 2015, 383–415 (388).
37 See David Seymour, Children of Europe, publication no. 403 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Paris: UNESCO 1949).
38 Allbeson, ‘Photographic diplomacy in the postwar world’, 403.
39 Jacob Deschin, ‘Children the theme: Seymour’s photographs on view at Limelight’, New York Times, 9 February 1958, 334.
40 Ben Shneiderman is the chief curator of the CHIM: David Seymour (1911–1956) website at https://davidseymour.com/ (viewed 15 March 2018).
41 ‘The children of Europe’, 7.
42 Seymour, Children of Europe, 6.
43 Ibid., 7.
44 ‘The children of Europe’, 7.
45 Ibid.
46 For the image (Reference PAR150821), see the Magnum Photos website at https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDVV88L.html (viewed 15 March 2018).
47 Marta Zarzycka, ‘Save the child: photographed faces and affective transactions in NGO child sponsoring programs’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2016, 28–42 (29).
48 Ibid., 38.
49 For the image (Reference PAR190908), see the Magnum Photos website at https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDWRBJCK.html (viewed 15 March 2018).
50 For the image (Reference PAR168298), see the Magnum Photos website at https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDNYB8C.html (viewed 15 March 2018).
51 For the image (Reference PAR192674), see the Magnum Photos website at http://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDZ3GW20.html (viewed 15 March 2018).
52 Allbeson, ‘Photographic diplomacy in the postwar world’, 407–8.
53 Valérie Gorin, ‘Looking back over 150 years of humanitarian action: the photographic archives of the ICRC’, International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 94, no. 888, 2012, 1349–79.
54 Alexandra Schultheis Moore, ‘Témoignage and responsibility in photo/graphic narratives of Médecins sans frontières’, Journal of Human Rights, vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, 87–102.
55 Zarzycka, ‘Save the child’, 28–42.
56 Eric Nooter, ‘Displaced persons from Bergen-Belsen: the JDC photographic archives’, History of Photography, vol. 23, no. 4, 1999, 331–40.
57 Gorin, ‘Looking back over 150 years of humanitarian action’, 1378.
58 Allbeson, ‘Photographic diplomacy in the postwar world’, 384.
59 ‘The children of Europe’, 7.
60 Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Speechless emissaries: refugees, humanitarian and dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 11, no. 3, 1996, 377–404 (378).
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 390.
63 Ibid.
64 See UNICEF, ‘Refugees in Europe: then and now’.
65 Ibid.
66 For the image (Reference PAR1116032), see the Magnum Photos website at http://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDIC99HH.html (viewed 15 March 2018).
67 Due to copyright restrictions, I am unable to include the split screen image. The relevant images are the very last pairing in UNICEF, ‘Refugees in Europe, then and now’.
68 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, ‘“A horrific photo of a drowned Syrian child”’, 1126.
69 On this topic, see Jill Walker Rettberg and Radhika Gajjala, ‘Terrorists or cowards: negative portrayals of male Syrian refugees in social media’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, 178–81; and Marta Szczepanik, ‘The “good” and “bad” refugees? Imagined refugeehood(s) in the media coverage of the migration crisis’, Journal of Identity and Migration Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016, 23–33.
70 Das Buch zur Ausstellung von Magnum Photos: Odyssee Europa—Flucht and Zuflucht seit 1945 (Reutlingen: Zeitenspiegel—Reportageschule Günter Dahl der Volkshochschule Reutlingen 2015), 30–1.
71 Carole Naggar, ‘Unraveling a 70-year-old photographic mystery’, 12 April 2017, available on the Time Magazine website at http://time.com/4735368/tereska-david-chim-seymour/ (viewed 15 March 2018). See also Tamara Zieve, ‘Story of iconic WWII photo revealed with launch of Tel Aviv exhibition’, 13 April 2017, available on the Jerusalem Post website at www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Story-of-iconic-WWII-photo-revealed-with-launch-of-Tel-Aviv-exhibition-486971 (viewed 15 March 2018).
72 See the exhibition catalogue, Capturing History: The Photography of Chim (Tel Aviv: Beit Hatfutsot 2017), 165.
73 Peter Gatrell, ‘Refugees—what’s wrong with history?’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, 170–89.
74 Lipphardt, ‘Communities on the move’, 233.
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Simone Gigliotti
Simone Gigliotti is Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Research Institute in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. This article is part of an ongoing project on home-seeking trajectories in and from post-Holocaust Europe. Email: [email protected]