'To Reunite the Dispersed Family'

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'To Reunite the Dispersed Family' History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ War, displacement and migration in the tracing files of the Australian Red Cross Ruth Balint The mass immigration of displaced persons (DPs) to Australia after the Second World War generated thousands of enquiries both to and from Australia of people searching for the fate of their family members. The Australian Red Cross tracing service often became the only means of communication for many families divided by the Cold War. This article examines the case files of Red Cross tracing enquiries for what they can reveal of the experiences of war, displacement and migration to Australia, and the reach of Cold War Europe in the everyday lives of migrants. These records also demonstrate the limits of the Red Cross goal of family reunion, for not all of those who were sought wished to be found. This article has been peer reviewed. To many contemporary observers of 1945, the destruction of the family was the most visible and devastating consequence of war. Its reunion was often promoted as humanity’s only possible salvation. ‘No other war’, writes Caroline Moorehead, ‘dispersed so many civilians’.1 Over 20 million people had been displaced by the war, either because they had been forcibly taken from their homes or because they had fled, and the frantic hunt for loved ones in the ruins of cities and communities became a first priority of the survivors of the devastation. ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ became the official mantra of Red Cross tracing in the postwar era, as the organisation sought to manage the thousands of urgent enquiries flooding its offices around the world in the aftermath of the Second World War. Even before war’s end, humanitarian organisations and western governments had begun planning for postwar relief, and the tracing of missing civilians was quickly identified as an issue of first 1 Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 517. 124 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ concern. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was at the frontline of tracing relief operations. Displaced refugees rather than soldiers and prisoners of war became the candidates and the focus of its tracing service, reflecting the fact that for the first time in the history of modern warfare, civilians were targetted by deliberate killing policies, their deaths and their displacement in numbers alone far outweighing those of soldiers on active duty.2 Over 170,000 DPs came to Australia, mostly via the DP camps of Allied- occupied Europe between 1947 and 1952.3 Many left for the west with the hope and the promise of bringing out other family members as soon as they were able. Others, many of whom had spent years languishing in DP camps, came still searching for information on whether their family members were alive, or where they had spent the war. Almost immediately the Australian Red Cross tracing service began receiving enquiries from individuals about tracing victims of Nazism, or from other Red Cross agencies overseas responding to enquiries in their own countries for family members who had migrated to Australia. As the Cold War deepened across Central and Eastern Europe, the Red Cross tracing load increased. While some of these enquiries came from Jewish families seeking the fate of their relatives in the Holocaust, the vast majority related to non-Jewish DPs from Eastern and Central Europe as well as the Soviet Union, universally understood as exiles from Communism rather than as victims of National Socialism.4 These included those who were forcibly relocated to Germany during the war as slave labourers and now refused to return home, a second wave of refugees who from mid- 1946 began streaming into Germany and Austria fleeing the Communist takeovers of their countries, and refugees from Soviet Russia whose trajectories of displacement sometimes dated back to the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.5 2 Timothy Snyder puts the figure of civilian victims of deliberate policies of mass murder by the Nazi and Soviet regimes at 14 million. See Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 409-12. Article 4 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 was an explicit recognition for the first time of the need for humanitarian law to protect civilians. Before this, the Geneva Conventions only related to the protection of combatants in wartime. See, https://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/treaties- customary-law/geneva-conventions/overview-geneva-conventions.htm (accessed 2 October 2014). 3 For a description of this history, see Jayne Persian’s contribution to this special feature, 78–99. 4 Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 119. 5 See the contributions by Edele and Fitzprick, 6–15, Edele, 16–39 and Persian, 76–99. 125 History Australia | Volume 12 | Number 2 | August 2015 These tracing records reveal, often in startling ways, the impact of Australia’s resettlement and migration policies on DP families who, often separated in the first instance by war, were then forced apart a second or third time by the strict requirements of entry to Australia via its Displaced Persons resettlement program. Migrant recruitment policies favoured the young, the fit and the unattached: in other words, single men who could perform the manual labouring work that was required to rebuild Australia’s economy. In the initial period of the displaced persons program, migrant ships out of Europe typically carried hundreds more men than women, and only a handful of small families. The fact that Australia’s immigration scheme tore families apart was not a secret. In 1950 a newspaper report quoted Harold Holt, immigration minister under the Menzies government, defending the separation of families under the current migration scheme in response to criticisms made by the Australian Council of the World Council of Churches. ‘The spiritual leaders of our community would be the last to suggest that we should leave family units to face a grim and hopeless future in Europe’, he was quoted as saying. ‘Yet this is the only alternative to the present arrangement whereby wives and children are housed in holding centres until such time as their bread winners can find family accommodation elsewhere.’6 When pressed, the government argued that such separations were temporary, the result of a housing crisis for migrant families in rural areas where the men were mainly indentured. Yet the Red Cross tracing records show that these temporary separations often led to more permanent family dislocations. While this situation changed towards the end of the DPP, as the International Refugee Organization (IRO) began to close the DP camps and Australia bowed to international pressure to relax restrictions on, for example, reuniting aged parents of Australian DPs, families remained a major casualty of the war long after the ‘violent peace’ of the postwar years subsided. 7 Many left behind families in DP camps, in their countries of origin, or in any of the other countries of exile or domicile that made up the complicated story of European displacement in the first half of the twentieth century. Sometimes what was intended as a temporary separation became more permanent as men re-established 6 ‘Migrant Wives Wait in Europe’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 16 February 1950, 4. 7 Peter Gattrell uses the term ‘violent peacetime’ to describe the immediate postwar years, during which population displacement continued on a global scale, the mass flight of Germans and others in the face of the Red Army but one example. Peter Gattrell, ‘Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars’, in The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9, ed. Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5–6. 126 ‘To reunite the dispersed family’ themselves with new wives and new families. The Cold War also cemented these rifts, for those left behind, most of them women and children, often remained stranded, only reaching out to the Red Cross when letters stopped coming and hopes of being reunited were becoming desperate. The international dimensions of Australia’s postwar migration history are still under-explored, despite a specialised literature on the history of Australia’s DP resettlement program .8 The break-up of families was a relatively well known consequence of Nazi Germany’s policies of forced labour, population transfers and liquidations, but there has been less recognition of the influence of resettlement policies of western governments on DP families in furthering these separations. An exception to this lacuna is a recent study by Joy Damousi of the separation of children from their parents during the Greek civil war (1946–49).9 Although of a different focus, the story of Greek family separation she tells is another example of Australia’s refugee history as one of family rupture. Thousands of children were separated from their parents, ending up in Communist countries in Eastern Europe, and their parents, some of whom came to Australia, spent years desperately trying to retrieve them. Her focus is on the role of the International Social Service (ISS), a branch of the International Migration Service, in facilitating these reunions: in particular she examines the indomitable efforts of its director, Aileen Fitzpatrick. Her article examines a number of individual cases of Greek families forcibly separated; like Damousi’s, this article deploys microhistory to tell a wider history of forced separation in the Cold War across what were often considered impermeable international borders during the 1950s and 1960s. The renowned neutrality of the Red Cross meant that it had extraordinary access in the Soviet Union or eastern bloc countries societies during the Cold War.
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