Voting With Their Feet: The (Attempted) Return of Polish Displaced Children to Occupied Germany

Abstract

In November 1946, after repatriating to Poland and reuniting with his parents, Władysław B., made the perilous journey back to US-occupied Germany; claiming his parents were dead, he sought emigration for a better future. Displaced persons (DPs) returning to centres was not uncommon; many wanted to change their futures by re-entering the camps and vied for a chance to resettle abroad. Employing Gatrell's concept of ‘refugeedom’ to understand the mechanisms which drove refugee agency in the postwar world, this work focuses on cases of Polish DP children who, often voiceless in official records, chose to direct their own future. It then uses Bandura's social cognitive theory framework, which distinguishes three modes of agency (personal, proxy, and collective) to differentiate between various groups and individuals’ abilities to take charge of their own displacement. The very act of migration – of ‘voting with their feet’ – helps us to understand how children attempted to take charge of their displacement. Using individual case files and welfare worker testimony, this work contextualizes the phenomenon of return migration to Allied-occupied Germany from Poland using the voices ‘in the middle’ to navigate children's agency while emphasizing the DPs’ refutation of Allied-imposed categorizations to strive for a better future.