Abstract
In 1943 Viennese refugee pedagogue Ernst Papanek turned in his master's thesis, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” for the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University. Particularly interested in their role in processes of knowledge translation and transfers, he circulated questionnaires among refugee children he had rescued from France to the United States. Through his thesis he gave the children a voice and depicted their agency. This article contextualizes Papanek's approach to the relief efforts in the United States in the early 1940s. Focusing especially on the responses of Austrian refugee children in the questionnaires, it uncovers aspects of the young people's experiential knowledge and how they were further explored in a follow-up study on Papanek's research from 1947. The article draws on recent approaches in migration studies that look at the intersection of knowledge and the experiences of young migrants, underlining its potential in research for unaccompanied minors and young refugees from Nazi persecution.
On the first page of his M.A. thesis for the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University “On Refugee Children. A Preliminary Study,” Viennese pedagogue Ernst Papanek (1900–1973) introduces his approach to the cohort he is studying. For him the education of this group is “of prime importance both for them and the country that gives them refuge.” Because of this, he was especially interested in the young people's own experiences. He wrote, “[The] observation of the group as a whole in cross-section and as represented by typical cases, can help us to a better understanding of those individuals who have backgrounds of wars and persecution.” He argued that this could be vital information for educators working with these children. “Perhaps such studies can help us to find better solutions to refugee and immigrant child problems, and help us prepare the philosophy, the approach and the technique of an important part of our post-war and educational work.”1 This approach was an integral part of the pedagogue's philosophy and reflected his own experiences as a refugee and a Socialist.
Born in Vienna in 1900 of Jewish parents, Ernst Papanek studied psychology and education science in Vienna. There he worked as a teacher and was active in the Socialist Party. After the short civil war in February 1934, when the Socialist Party was outlawed by the Austro-fascist government, he fled to Czechoslovakia. In the following years Papanek was active in many European countries from Belgium to Yugoslavia. From 1936 to 1938 he coordinated the relief efforts of the Socialist International in Spain. In the summer of 1938 Papanek went to France to organize a summer camp for refugee children from Poland and for children of French Socialists. In fall 1938 the Jewish relief organization Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE, Children's Aid Society) offered him the administration of a refugee home near Paris. Shortly after he organized several homes for Kindertransport children. In September 1940 Papanek arrived in New York after an odyssey with many young refugees. Between the end of 1940 and July 1942 he managed to bring about 300 children—many of Austrian Jewish descent—to the United States.2
Just as the homes Papanek organized in France were inspired by the progressive educational movement and concepts such as co-administration or practical knowledge learned in group experience, so, too, was his work in the United States. Unlike many American relief workers at the time, he did not view the child refugees as receiving objects, but as subjects with agency and bearers of knowledge. He was especially focused on the group of unaccompanied minors who often served as knowledge translators between old and new social or cultural environments.3
In his thesis “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study” (1943), Papanek focused, among other things, on questions of knowledge in the context of migration. Consequently, his study lends itself to recent approaches in migration studies that look at the intersection of knowledge and the experiences of young migrants.4 Focusing on migrant knowledge formed through experiences like persecution, flight, or rejection, this approach also sees the necessity or value of cultural or everyday knowledge and looks at young migrants in a variety of go-between constellations.5 Of particular interest is a questionnaire Papanek circulated beginning in December 1942 among the young refugee group he brought to the United States from France. This questionnaire, which provided the primary data for his 160-page study, created opportunities that allowed the young refugees to speak as actors, producers, and conveyers of knowledge in the process of flight and after. This offers an opportunity to examine Papanek's perceptions of the young refugees as well as their own expressions of knowledge and agency.
In this article, I turn to Papanek's papers held in the New York Public Library, which holds his study “On Refugee Children,” as well as the questionnaires, all of which have gone largely unanalyzed.6 In the first section, I introduce Papanek's study and the context of refugees in New York. I ask specifically how Papanek perceived refugee children and what exactly he wants to know? In the second section, I focus on responses of the young refugees from Austria in the group studied.7 I am particularly interested in the ways the answers reflect their agency, experiences, and knowledge transfers.8 In the last part I turn to the follow-up study “Refugee Children's Adjustment in the United States” from 1947. Viewed in the context of recent research on youth migrants, knowledge, and agency, an examination of Papanek will reveal his approaches to unaccompanied minor refugees. The questionnaire and the study served as a medium to translate both Papanek's and the children's experiential knowledge for organizations and institutions in the United States dealing with refugee children.
On Refugee Children—The Context and Content
By the time Papanek arrived in New York in September 1940, refugee pedagogues within his network had already established themselves.9 Refugee scholars and US social scientists had by now launched studies of refugees and identified children in this group.10 Relief organizations from the local to the state level had been set up, most notably accommodating Jewish refugee children and led by social workers who had direct links to Papanek and constituted existing networks when he arrived. Shortly after the November Pogrom of 1938, members of the New York School of Social Work and others created the Non-Sectarian Committee for German Refugee Children.11 In 1941 the National Conference of Social Work in Atlantic City preformulated the “organized and systematic setup for refugee children.”12
As the title of his M.A. thesis, “On Refugee Children. A Preliminary Study,” suggests, Papanek thought of it as a pilot study of young refugees in the United States. He strove to present “their experiences,” but also, addressing his potential audience of aid workers, “our own experiences with them.” To this end Papanek gathered information from 214 children: 106 female, 121 between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. They stemmed from seventeen countries, including sixty-four from Germany and forty-eight from Austria. Papanek also distributed questionnaires to seventeen social workers from fourteen different agencies, to ten teachers as well as physicians and camp counselors, and to five foster parents and nine refugee parents, all to broaden the “understanding of the children's answers.” The inclusion of teachers and social workers points to the intended audience. By including expert knowledge in relief work, it was oriented to the young refugees' “post-war education and work.”13
As Papanek stated in his conclusion, it was vital to include the voices of refugee children and to recognize them as individuals.14 To this end, it was necessary to “undertake a careful study of their backgrounds, their problems, their psychological development after all their varied experiences of their adjustment to democracy and freedom, to life in a democratic country, in a humane environment after the bestial persecutions they have suffered.” On a practical level, asking the refugee children about their experiences came with specific bodies of knowledge they had gained because of their forced migration—“the school experience of many refugee children from different countries can be used to enlarge our knowledge of foreign educational systems.” But, more importantly, Papanek was interested in the “behavior problems of refugee children” as well as the “non-existence of many problems we would expect.” In their answers to the questionnaire almost all of the refugee children stressed the “tremendous importance of the feeling of security, belonging and friendship.” In particular, Papanek highlighted the impact of family separation, “the problem of parent-substitutes,” and in general “the study of their abnormal and pathological sociology and psychology that can help us to a clearer understanding of the normal.”15
Papanek's questionnaire contained more than seventy questions, starting with personal information about age, gender, and family relations and the contacts for or whereabouts of relatives and then it focused on pertinent bodies of experiential knowledge. The study highlighted participants' age, gender, class, and flight circumstances and it tied these aspects to schooling, welfare, and “psychological, moral and social behavior.” In the first part, the questionnaire and the study dealt mainly with experiences of persecution and flight. The questions focused on specific incidences of violence the Austrian children may had witnessed before and after Anschluss, such as the experience of exclusion in school or from friendship networks. They also were queried about the experiences of war, for instance, air raids in France or England. In addition, questions about family separation, partial reunion, and repeated separation from parents and from siblings and other relatives played a significant role in the entire study and elicited very emotional responses from the children. The children were also asked about their “Americanization” in a country at war and about their loyalties, their willingness to help others, and about “democracy or dictatorship.”16
Young Refugees' Experience, Agency, and Knowledge
Although the questionnaire and the resulting study are by no means focused primarily on the intersection of agency and knowledge-related aspects, Papanek amplified this in the structure of his study. Following short introductions, he used quotations from the questionnaires to give the refugee children a voice. Their words and not the interpretation of the words form the main body of the study. Papanek had already used this method in France when he quoted from letters refugee children sent him to acquire support from relief organizations.17 This approach refuses to reduce young refugees to objects, which was typical for relief organizations and educational institutions at the time. It challenged the view of them as mere receptacles of bodies of knowledge, who took no active role in their new surroundings.18
Page 1 of an anonymized questionnaire from Ernst Papanek, filled by a sixteen-year-old boy from Vienna in 1943. The arrow and marks at the left bottom document Papanek's appraisal and selection. (Questionnaire 23, p. 1, in box 10, folder “Refugee Children Questionnaire A - 2, 5, 7, 9–29,” Ernst Papanek Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Photo: Swen Steinberg, January 2020.)
Page 1 of an anonymized questionnaire from Ernst Papanek, filled by a sixteen-year-old boy from Vienna in 1943. The arrow and marks at the left bottom document Papanek's appraisal and selection. (Questionnaire 23, p. 1, in box 10, folder “Refugee Children Questionnaire A - 2, 5, 7, 9–29,” Ernst Papanek Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Photo: Swen Steinberg, January 2020.)
The absence of traditional knowledge institutions and possible ways to substitute them was of particular interest to Ernst Papanek. His study pointed to both the individual experience and the aspect of growing up in the refugee situation with the “problem of parent-substitutes” mentioned before. One refugee child shared the following observation: “If they were able to accept separation they matured more rapidly. Others, unfit for this trying experience, sometimes remained insecure in themselves. Especially in cases of insecurity of parents and lack of information.”19 This quotation exposes the psychological strains as well as the observations of the children themselves. The absence of the parents as well as knowing or not knowing their whereabouts had long-term consequences for the refugee children's behavior or adjustment. Such answers about growing up without parents and changing roles in flight tended to create knowledge about the young refugees based on their reflections of their own experience. At the same time, they were influenced by bodies of knowledge that refugee pedagogues like Papanek gained in flight. Undoubtedly, to a certain extent the questions and answers underlined Papanek's own pedagogical perspective. Already confronted with trauma, loss, and emotions observed during his child relief work in France, he developed therapeutic approaches for dealing with the young refugees.20
Being on one's own in the context of flight created specific bodies of knowledge for and limited to these refugee children. Papanek asked specifically about their experiential knowledge in different accommodation situations, ranging from co-administered youth homes to boarding schools and foster parents. The answers to these questions reflect Papanek's own experiences and his stance as a pedagogue. When he started planning his “Training Homes for Refugee Children” at the end of 1940 in New York, he disagreed with the US-American argument that unaccompanied minor refugees would be better assimilated in host or foster families.21 Out of the 214 children in his study, 98 lived in American foster families in 1943. Most relief agencies and social workers in the United States “strongly endorsed family placement over institutional care.” Moreover, organizations such as the German Jewish Children Aid, founded in 1934, considered the placement in foster families as an instrument “to mitigate American antisemitism.”22
The former Socialist youth functionary challenged both with his approach to collective children's homes and its relationship to family separation. In June 1941 he summarized that the rearing in a “children community” could not substitute for the family; the experience of growing up in a family and with other children had to be complementary. But this was impossible in the situation of the flight of unaccompanied minors. Here Papanek viewed education in the community of a refugee home as a strategy to overcome the trauma of persecution, loss, and flight. In contrast, he saw the potential of the well-being of the young refugees “destroyed by an imposed foster parents' upbringing.” Papanek also emphasized economic benefits, which would perhaps persuade the Americans. From his experiences in France, he knew “the costs for such homes are not higher, but rather smaller than those for a well-organized and controlled foster parents' campaign.”23
The children in his study confirmed this approach and underlined the fact that this study represented both the agency of refugee children and the agency of the refugee Ernst Papanek, who formulated the questions and arranged the quoted answers. A seventeen-year-old boy from Austria who had experienced the group situation in the French refugee children's homes and multiple foster homes wrote:
I lived with 3 different families before this one. Since I have had quite an experience with foster parents, I should say that the advantages and disadvantages vary with the families. One thing, however, is definite. All foster parents desire to make their foster children happy as they know how. How they succeed depends upon their foster child's attitude, and his background. If he comes from rich parents, even the best intentions of a poorer family will only succeed in making the child unhappy.24
On the same page of the study, Papanek quotes an eighteen-year-old girl from Austria to support his point of view. “In a children's institution we acquire very often excellent friendships. We do not get too self-centered or spoiled. I think that there is nothing as beautiful as living among people of one's own age. Institutions are of my best memories.”25 Based on his experience with young refugees and their own responses and taking the agency of these refugees into account, Papanek (and like-minded pedagogues) advocated for peer-to-peer relations in institutions.
At the same time, the institutions supported strong bonds between the cohorts and created their own “knowledge spaces” by cutting the young refugees off from the outside world. The Austrian girl quoted previously also mentioned a disadvantage. “I can think of only one. When you come out of a children's institution you can assimilate only very badly to real life, which is, unfortunately, very much different from the institution's life.” From the perspective of the refugee children, homes like the ones Papanek organized in France hampered the possibility to gain or translate knowledge of the receiving societies and, perhaps most important, friendships. A girl respondent from Austria described how she tried “to live in the present,” which was “usually impossible” with “refugees, speaking German, at least in terms of culture and the world people live in.” On the other hand, it was difficult for her “to establish contact with Americans, completely impossible to become friends with non-Jews.” Another eleven-year-old girl wrote, “My girl friend is Austrian as I am. I am not long enough in America to have friends here.”26 The questions in this section triggered comparisons based on the experiential knowledge of the young refugees. A seventeen-year-old girl from Austria compared, for example, the knowledge she gained through migration when she summarized: “I do think that American boys and girls are quite different from Europeans.”27 Such comparisons can be found in many answers, for example, about the school systems in the United States, France, Switzerland, or Austria, mirroring the refugee experience of the children.28 It was this kind of knowledge Papanek was interested in with his study, as he stated, he wanted to “enlarge our knowledge of foreign educational systems.”29
Some of the refugee children adjusted to living in a more or less isolated community and reflected—in terms of knowledge production and its translation—on the value of such relationships. One child noted, “If you go with them you learn the customs of the American people.” But most of the children described this as rather difficult, even if they were in school. Many of them made friends only among other refugees or in organizations like the Free Austrian Youth. In a rare response, an Austrian boy reported membership in the Boy Scouts of America.30
The number of quotations on the topic of friendships or contacts to other nonrefugee children in Papanek's study shows the importance that both the refugee children and the refugee author assigned to traditional knowledge institutions like schools—even if knowledge-related processes and “the adjustment problems of these children” were not exclusively limited to the classroom. But schools proved to be a space where the young refugees encountered the new social and political environment. At school they made friends, but also witnessed racism. Because of the own experiential knowledge, that is, the racial persecution and flight they had experienced, they were particularly attuned to the discrimination of others. A twelve-year-old Austrian girl living in California wrote in Papanek's questionnaire, “I like schools, government, people. I like churches. I dislike racial difference, the way the children in our school stand off the Mexicans.” An Austrian boy of fifteen years responding to the question “What do you like,” combined both his experiential knowledge and the adjusted knowledge or expectations about North America. “I dislike discrimination against negroes, Italians, Irish, a. s. o. … Indians and Wild West seem to be scarcer then expected; same with millionaires and gangsters.”31
Most of the children had left home five years before completing the questionnaire and had spent about two years in the United States. Consequently, the aspect of “loyalties” asked for in the last section of the questionnaire was of particular interest concerning integration or assimilation and the extent of Americanization.32 Many Austrian refugee children answered that they miss home but would like to stay in the United States if they had to make a choice. The answers reveal coping strategies with the new environment and the past at the same time. An eighteen-year-old girl wrote that she missed the “culture of Vienna.” She described herself as “homesick for Europe” and reported how she had been “reading books by European authors.” Through these recent readings she “rediscovered among other things, Viennese slang and the Viennese sense of humor.”33 This young refugee from Austria found a strategy to regain forgotten bodies of knowledge from her past. The example illustrates the role that loss plays in knowledge-related processes during and after migration. Migration and knowledge do not just form a positivist relation of transfer and contribution. On the contrary, knowledge of migrants has been rejected or devalued on the side of receiving societies and got lost on the side of the migrants.34 This example shows the latter. Past bodies of knowledge remained dormant until she started reading about Vienna.
The agency of the children in the “On Refugee Children” study is revealed literally on the questionnaires housed in the Ernst Papanek Papers in the New York Public Library. The young refugees returned the anonymized questionnaires with their full names, well aware that Papanek knew them from homes in France and/or from New York. Indeed, the refugee group stayed in contact with Papanek and even visited him and his family in his new home in Queens in 1943.35 Since the children knew the inquirer, they probably guessed what Papanek wanted to know. Consequently, this specific interplay of bodies of knowledge is hard to distinguish in the questionnaires. It can possibly be identified in the use of specific terms or communication strategies. Most of the Austrian children described, for example, their situation and even the separation from their family as unproblematic, communicating to Papanek that they adjusted well.36 We can observe similar notions in recollections from the past. A sixteen-year-old boy from Vienna wrote, for example, about the “everlasting influence” of having been part of an OSE “children's institution” in France. This answer indicates both the specific and unusual relationship in this study as Papanek was the organizer of these homes.37
In another unexpected gesture on the part of the children, they took the opportunity to start a personal conversation with Papanek. They asked, for example, in separate letters about his wife and children.38 A twelve-year-old girl and a sixteen-year-old boy from Austria added a personal “Dear Ernst” note at the end of the questionnaires.39 Others thanked him for “tickets for a concert” that he had send “a short while ago.” Some asked if they should give the questionnaire to other former OSE children they knew.40 Some even asked Papanek if he could put them in contact with other refugee children from France.41 Even though the questionnaire was never intended for this kind of active role, it mirrors the specific awareness refugee pedagogues like Papanek had of refugee children's agency and their knowledge. Indeed, he included this in his study.42
The Follow-up: “Refugee Children's Adjustment”
In contrast to Papanek's early research on refugee children, which has been viewed as significant, Papanek's unpublished “On Refugee Children” study has hardly been cited.43 One important exception is the follow-up survey Elizabeth Tilly Gutmann conducted with the children from Papanek's study. Papanek supported Gutmann's undertaking in December 1946 with a letter to his former charges, indicating that “it is important that we here in America pool all our knowledge and experience.”44 Her endeavor turned out to be difficult since the children had left the schools she turned to for contact information.45 In March 1947 she handed in the eighty-one-page master's thesis “Refugee Children's Adjustment in the United States. An Investigation Based on a Follow-Up on Mr. Ernst Papanek's Study.” She, like Papanek, was a student at the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University. Following Papanek's survey from 1943, Gutmann saw the challenge of her topic in its variety of implications, namely “political, economic, educational, cultural and psychological considerations. There is, therefore, the great danger, that, among all these aspects, the subject, namely the child himself and his needs, are pushed into a position of secondary importance.”46
Gutmann reached out to thirty-seven of Papanek's children (including fifteen from Austria) but only nineteen returned the circulated questionnaires, which she included in her study. Twelve additional responses came from children who arrived in the United States from Europe in 1946. She was particularly interested in these “children's adjustment” and on Americanization in the specific setting of unaccompanied minor refugees.47 Gutmann also asked for “the children's own suggestions” in setting up services “designated to help these children.”48 Juxtaposed to Papanek's study, many of the same topics remained dominant. For example, a now twenty-year-old Austrian woman from the 1943 group summarized the impact of family separation. “After ten years of not having any parents, I have gotten used to the idea. But I still miss having parents like all other boys and girls have.” A boy from Austria, now sixteen years old, echoed Papanek's approach of refugee homes. “I think living with other people of my age has helped me tremendously to adjust myself to many environments, conditions, and people, sometimes the hard way, how to live with people. I realize that I still have a great deal to learn, but it has helped.”49
Many answers show the experiential knowledge from a distance of the additional four years, especially concerning assimilation or in comparison with experiences from the time before coming to the United States. Another Austria youth of the same age compared the way of living in the United States with “abroad,” using his experiential knowledge both from home and from Europe as a refugee. He liked “the states, for their informality and lack of false formality.” A seventeen-year-old from Austria, “after having wandered from country to country,” pointed to “more opportunity to study and to earn” in the United States. But belonging and being still a stranger even among new friends played a role here, too. In Gutmann's study, a fifteen-year-old girl remembered how much she hated the question “which do you like better, America or Austria.”50 Questions like this put the young refugees in a position of choosing and pushed them to come down on the side of the United States.
Others were very critical of the social and cultural aspects of their new home, which besides racism, was a stance largely absent in Papanek's 1943 study. A boy from Austria was still surprised “that such a rich country has to have its slums, and poor South, and labor troubles.” A now twenty-year-old man from Austria “didn't know about the ignorant and miserable millions.” A fifteen-year-old girl from Austria criticized the “rotten radio and awful movies.”51 The absence of this kind of critique in the 1943 questionnaire might indicate a form of self-censorship in the host country that had saved their lives.
The question of “adjustment” was mainly answered with examples from school, sports, and friendships, spheres where the young refugees could come in contact with the new social environments. Here, they could become go-betweens regarding the old and the new orders of knowledge. A refugee from Austria, now nineteen years old, remembered he had been “mainly associated with other refugees” in New York, which had cut him off from starting over. Another former Austrian refugee from Papanek's study expressly advised in 1947, “Help them to come in contact with American children[,] that will make them at home in an American ‘gang.’” Another boy from Austria advocated for specific knowledge transfers; young refugees that arrived recently should meet with “some ex-refugee children who have adjusted themselves to their new way of lives.”52
Conclusion
When Ernst Papanek brought his pedagogical knowledge to France, he had to adjust it to the fluid refugee situation and to phenomena like trauma or loss he was not familiar with from his education and work in Austria. A similar process took place—but failed—after his flight to the United States. Papanek was unable to continue his practical relief work in refugee homes because of the different cultural context. He could not apply the experiential knowledge gained in refugee relief in France, since his collective home approach contradicted the strategies of established relief organizations in dealing with refugee children in the United States.53 As Laura Hobson Faure has noted recently, “Adaption to American life was thus an individual, and not a group experience.”54 Even though Papanek was sensitive to the needs of the individual refugee child, his methods were considered inopportune.
Unable to establish group homes, Papanek began studying social work, allowing him to gain a professional foothold in a related field. His bibliography, mirrored by his professional career, documents this shift in the 1940s and '50s.55 In 1945 he became the director of the Children's and Youth Welfare Organization of the Unitarian Service Committee and founded the relief program American Youth for World Youth. One year later and in the midst of the next refugee crisis, Papanek traveled to Europe to deliver a comprehensive report to the United Nations on refugee camps and children's homes in Germany, France, Holland, and Czechoslovakia.56 However, this did not become his central sphere of work, which centered on innovative pedagogy. In 1948 Papanek became the head of the Brooklyn Training School for mainly African American children. In his work there he dealt with people who he viewed as “refugees in their own country.” Addressing juvenile delinquency and pedagogic concepts aimed at overcoming inequalities and racism in the United States are part of the postwar legacy of the Viennese pedagogue. He continued to address these challenges as a professor for pedagogy at Queens College in 1959 and at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1968.57 However, his ideas on unaccompanied refugee children were largely forgotten until they were published simply as a topic of his personal recollections, Out of the Fire, in 1975—two years after Papanek died.58
Combined with the questionnaires and the correspondence in Papanek's papers, the unpublished results of the “On Refugee Children. A Preliminary Study” represent a perspective of a refugee on young refugees ahead of its time. The children from Austria in Papanek's 1943 study revealed knowledge-related processes when they reflected on their situation in the new setting. As unaccompanied minors, they had to develop knowledge strategies outside of traditional institutions of knowledge dissemination such as the family. Many described their in-betweenness in refugee networks and friendships with American children, most of them reflected on the experiential knowledge gained in a flight “from country to country.”59 In this regard, Papanek's approaches seem relevant not only for historical refugee research or research interested in the intersection of migration and knowledge. Rather, his work seems relevant in relief efforts for unaccompanied minor refugees today.
Ernst Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study” (1943), p. 1, box 28, folder “Refugee Study,” Ernst Papanek Papers (hereafter Papanek Papers), Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. I would like to thank Jacqueline Vansant for her feedback and the thoughtful revision of this paper that represents a pilot study for a research project on knowledge transfers and communication strategies of young refugees from Nazi persecution.
For this part of his life see Lilly Maier, Auf Wiedersehen Kinder! Ernst Papanek: Reformpädagoge, Revolutionär und Retter jüdischer Kinder (Wien/Graz: Molden, 2021), 23–199. For the detailed analysis of Papanek's relief activities in France and the emigration of Jewish children to the United States, see Laura Hobson Faure, “European Expectations, American Realities: The Emigration of Jewish Children from Occupied France to the United States, 1941–42,” in Gender, Family and Transmission in the Contemporary Jewish Context, ed. Martine Gross, Sophie Nizard, and Yann Scioldo-Zurcher (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2017), 143–57; Hobson Faure, “Attentes européennes, réalités américaines: l'émigration des enfants de l'OEuvre de Secours aux Enfants de la France occupée vers les États-Unis, 1941–1942,” in L'OEuvre de Secours aux Enfant et les populations juives au xxe sièclePrévenir et guérir dans un siècle de violences, ed. Laura Hobson Faure, Mathias Gardet, Katy Hazan, and Catherine Nicault (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 166–83; Jean-Christophe Coffin, “Ernst Papanek (1900–1973): une pédagogie à l'épreuve de la violence,” in L'OEuvre de Secours, ed. Faure et al., 148–65.
For a general overview of Papanek's pedagogy see Maier, Auf Wiedersehen Kinder!, 120–32; for the aspects of co-administration and practical knowledge, see especially 125–27.
Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, “Why Young Migrants Matter in the History of Knowledge,” in “Knowledge and Young Migrants,” ed. Lässig and Steinberg, special issue, KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 3, no. 2 (2019): 196–219.
See Simone Lässig, “Knowledge and the Agency of Children in Migration Contexts,” the introduction to Go-Betweens: A Mini-Series on Youth, Migration, and Knowledge Transfer Migrant Knowledge, August 5, 2020, https://migrantknowledge.org/2020/08/05/knowledge-and-agency/, and for other historical examples in this perspective the contributions in this mini-series, edited by the author of this article.
Most recently Ernst Papanek's work and legacy have been recognized in Maier's Papanek biography Auf Wiedersehen Kinder!. However, although she mentions the study “On Refugee Children” (208), she does not analyze it. Papanek's writings published posthumously are primarily based on the pedagogue's documents housed in Amsterdam. See Ernst Papanek, Die Kinder von Montmorency (Wien: Fischer, 1983); Ernst Papanek—Pädagogische und therapeutische Arbeit. Kinder mit Verfolgungs-, Flucht- und Exilerfahrungen während der NS-Zeit, ed. Inge Hansen-Schaberg, Hanna Papanek, and Gabriele Rühl-Nawabi (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2015). These publications were first undertaken by family members and in recent years by German and Austrian exile researchers.
See Christian H. Stifter, Zwischen geistiger Erneuerung und Restauration US-amerikanische Planungen zur Entnazifizierung und demokratischen Neuorientierung österreichischer Wissenschaft 1941–1955 (Wien: Böhlau, 2014); Peter Eppel, ed., Österreicher im Exil: USA 1938–1945. Eine Dokumentation, 2 vols. (Wien: Bundesverlag, 1995); Friedrich Stadler and Peter Weibel, eds., Vertreibung der Vernunft: The Cultural Exodus from Austria (Wien: Springer, 1995).
The intersection of knowledge and agency of migrants has only recently attracted scholars of historical migration research. For a discussion, see Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, “Knowledge on the Move. New Approaches toward a History of Migrant Knowledge,” in “Knowledge and Migration,” ed. Lässig and Steinberg, special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43, no. 3 (2017): 313–46. In contrast, the question of agency has been long debated in historical childhood studies. See Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education,” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 1–14; Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 114–24. Research on young refugees and unaccompanied minors in present global migrations has recently emerged. See Işik Kulu-Glasgow, Sanne Noyon and Monika Smit, “‘I just wanted to be safe.’ Agency and Decision-making Among Unaccompanied Minor Asylum Seekers,” in Unaccompanied Children: From Migration to Integration, ed. Işik Kulu-Glasgow, Monika Smit, and İbrahim Sirkeci (London: Transnational Press, 2019), 29–49; Marine Carrin, Harald Tambs-Lyche, and Dominique Blanc, ed., Transfer of Knowledge and Children's Agency: Reconstructing the Paradigm of Socialisation (New Delhi: Primus, 2016); Jacqueline Knörr, ed., Childhood and Migration: From Experience to Agency (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005).
In 1942 Trude Frankl organized the Children's Colony in New York, a boarding home for unaccompanied minors who had fled Europe. Frankl, a reform pedagogue and refugee from Vienna, first worked as a Kindertransport caretaker in 1939 in Britain. Later she accompanied a Kindertransport to Papanek's refugee homes in France. Although he was unable to set up his own group homes for refugee children, Papanek worked as a consultant on education issues for the Children's Colony. Swen Steinberg, “Young Refugees and Knowledge in New York during World War II: The Example of Babette Deutsch's ‘The Welcome,’” Migrant Knowledge, August 17, 2020, https://migrantknowledge.org/2020/08/17/go-betweens/; Maier, Auf Wiedersehen Kinder!, 204. Other examples can be identified in schools founded by refugee pedagogues for refugee children and in the efforts of refugee pedagogues in schools in general. Hildegard Feidel-Mertz and Andrea Hammel, “Integration and Formation of Identity: Exile Schools in Great Britain,” in Kindertransporte 1938/39—Rescue and Integration, special issue, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no. 1 (2004): 71–84; Hildegard Feidel-Mertz, ed., Schulen im Exil: Die verdrängte Pädagogik nach 1933 (Rororo: Reinbek, 1983).
German refugee scholar Gerhart Saenger (1910–98) arrived in 1937 in the United States. In 1941 his book Today's Refugees, Tomorrow's Citizens appeared in New York. Saenger already recognized the approximately 28,000 child refugees from Europe who developed “a maturity and initiative far beyond their years” through flight experience. Gerhart Saenger, Today's Refugees, Tomorrow's Citizens. A Story of Americanization (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 44. See for child refugees in other global contexts and in general Mikhal Dekel, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Mischa Honeck and James Marten, eds., War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Simone Gigliotti and Monica Tempian, eds., The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust and Postwar Displacement (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Jutta Vogel, Die Odyssee der Kinder. Auf der Flucht aus dem Dritten Reich ins Gelobte Land (Frankfurt/M.: Eichborn, 2008); Alan Gill, Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from Hitler's Reich (Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holten, What Happened to the Young Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Philip K. Jason and Iris Posner, eds., Don't Wave Goodbye: The Children's Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (London: I. B. Taurus, 2004).
See Hobson Faure, “European Expectations, American Realities,” 146, 148–52.
Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,”3, 165–67. See for the Jewish refugee children in the United States esp. Hobson Faure, “European Expectations, American Realities”; Sonnert and Holten, What Happened to the Young Children; Jason and Posner, Don't Wave Goodbye; Judith Tydor Baumel, Unfulfilled Promise: Rescue and Resettlement of Jewish Refugee Children in the United States, 1934–1945 (Juneau, AK: Denali Press, 1990).
Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” 1, 10.
Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove, and Carla Pascoe Leahy, eds., Children's Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). See also for aspects like memory and generation Merilyn Moos, Breaking the Silence. Voices of the British Children of Refugees from Nazism (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).
Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” 165–67.
Ibid., 124, 167.
See a couple of examples in box 8, folder “Home for Refugee Children of the OSE Union in France (1940),” Papanek Papers.
Helene Maimann, “Sprachlosigkeit. Ein zentrales Phänomen der Exilerfahrung,” in Leben im Exil. Probleme der Integration deutscher Flüchtlinge im Ausland 1933–1945, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald and Wolfgang Schieder (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1981), 31–38. Following postcolonial perspectives, the latter has been questioned by migration and refugee researchers. In his 2020 article “Can the Refugee Speak?” Volker M. Heins focuses on the refugee's “speechlessness” on the one hand and self-empowerment on the other, topics not new in exile studies. Volker M. Heins, “Can the Refugee Speak? Albert Hirschmann and the Changing Meanings of Exile,” Thesis Eleven, no. 158 (2020), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0725513619888666
Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” 56.
See for example Ernst Papanek, “My Experiences with Refugee Children in Europe,” The Nervous Child 2 (1943): 301–7.
“Manuscript Project for establishing training homes for refugee children,” undated, box 8, folder “Project for est. of training homes for refugee children,” Papanek Papers. See also Ernst Papanek— Pädagogische und therapeutische Arbeit, ed. Hansen-Schaberg, Papanek, and Rühl-Nawabi, 53.
Hobson Faure, “European Expectations, American Realities,” 151.
Manuscript, June 1941, box 8, folder “Home for Refugee Children of the OSE Union in France,” Papanek Papers.
Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” 53.
Ibid.
Ibid., 54, 65.
See also the example of an eighteen-year-old Austrian; she summarized too that “the American girls are so different.” Ibid., 74.
See for example ibid., 110–14.
Ibid., 166.
Ibid., 64, 67, 77.
Ibid., 76, 78. See also the example of a seventeen-year-old girl from Austria, who wrote: “I like everything except the still existing discrimination against Jews and negroes” (79).
See for this aspect and the role of schools in the United States Cliff Stratton, Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Amy J. Wan, Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).
Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” 144.
Lukas M. Verburgt, “The History of Knowledge and the Future History of Ignorance,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 4, no. 1 (2020): 1–24; Robert N. Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Maier, Auf Wiedersehen Kinder!, 202.
Questionnaire 23, in box 10, folder “Refugee Children Questionnaire A - 2, 5, 7, 9–29,” Papanek Papers.
Ibid.
Questionnaire 24, attached letter from Habana, in ibid.
Questionnaire 23; Questionnaire 34, box 10, folder “34–38,” Papanek Papers.
Letter from Adi to Ernst Papanek, February 21, 1943, box 10, folder “Questionnaire 46–58.”
Questionnaire 24, attached letter from Habana. See also Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” 71, when a twelve-year-old Austrian boy listed all his friends from France and wrote, “I would like to come in touch with them again.” Other similar requests are found on pages 71–72 of the study.
See for example Papanek, “On Refugee Children: A Preliminary Study,” 71–72.
The “significant early scientific contribution to refugee research,” Lilly Maier stated most recently, is not mirrored in the New York Public Library sources. Maier, Auf Wiedersehen Kinder!, 208.
Letter from Ernst Papanek, December 1946, appendix to Elizabeth Tilly Gutmann, “Refugee Children's Adjustment in the United States: An Investigation Based on a Follow-Up on Mr. Ernst Papanek's Study,” box 9, folder “Master's thesis by Elizabeth Tilly Gutmann 1947,” Papanek Papers.
Ethel Verry to Ernst Papanek, February 6, 1947, box 9, folder “Follow-up to Papanek's Study,” Correspondence, Papanek Papers.
Gutmann, “Refugee Children's Adjustment in the United States,” 1.
Elizabeth Gutmann to Eric A. Weld, January 6, 1947, box 9, folder “Follow-up to Papanek's Study,” Correspondence, Papanek Papers.
Gutmann, “Refugee Children's Adjustment in the United States,” 2–5, 8, quote on page 2.
Ibid., 15, 18.
Ibid., 32, 58.
Ibid., 34–35, 37.
Ibid., 54, 56, 60.
Hobson Faure, “European Expectations, American Realities,” 151.
Ibid., 152. See also Sonnert and Holten, What Happened to the Young Children, 93–139.
Papanek published already in the beginning of 1942 about his Experience in France with air raids and the consequences for children in schools, his 1943 questionnaire contained questions about these experiences too. He also published about Refugee Children in Europe and his Refugee Children's Homes in France. But with the end of the war, Papanek started focusing on the postwar situation and published, for example, in 1948 articles about Youth after the Catastrophe or the Emotional Patterns of Deported Children. In the letter from December 1946 for the follow-up survey of Elizabeth Gutmann, Papanek announced that information from the questionnaires will be used in “a study of the refugee children on which I am working on now.” But at the beginning of the 1950s and following the new responsibilities in the Brooklyn Training School, his interest finally shifted to topics like Juvenile Delinquency, the Role of Reward and Punishment in Education and Correction or Society and Its Schools. “Ernst Papanek Selected Bibliography (since 1940),” October 1967, box 30, folder “Selected Bibliography 1967,” Papanek Papers; letter from Ernst Papanek, December 1946, in appendix to Gutmann, “Refugee Children's Adjustment in the United States: An Investigation Based on a Follow-Up on Mr. Ernst Papanek's Study.”
Jan C. Jansen and Simone Lässig, eds., Refugee Crisis 1945–2000: Political and Societal Responses in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Maier, Auf Wiedersehen Kinder!, 212–14, 217, 218–28, 248.
Ernst Papanek with Edwin Linn, Out of the Fire: A Poignant Account of How an Eminent Educator Helped Save Jewish Children from the Hitler Onslaught (New York: William Morrow, 1975).
Gutmann, “Refugee Children's Adjustment in the United States,” 32.
