The reports and images of Ukrainian women fleeing with their children, leaving their menfolk behind to fight are shocking and heartbreaking. But they should not be surprising. War is an enemy to families. It breaks them apart even if no one dies.

The Second World War forced all sorts of parents to send their children away into the unknown in order to protect them from a known danger.

In London, elementary school children evacuated to rural parts of the country with their teachers but without their parents. Those parents could only hope that the local adults who took them in would treat them kindly. Some parents were so afraid of the bombing that they sent their children to unknown destinations in Canada to protect them from it.

Later in the war, German families made the same gamble that their children would eat better, be safer from the war and be treated kindly if they sent them away from their homes in the city.

Once the Nazis started deporting Jewish families “for resettlement” as they called it, some Jewish parents faced a harrowing choice. Either believe the Nazi claim that Jews were being taken to work in farms and factories and gamble that children would be better off with their parents even if conditions were less comfortable than at home. Or, if they could find a place for their child, gamble that the child would only survive with strangers, be they in a school or a family. In hindsight, the choice might be obvious. But nothing was clear in 1942 or 1943.

Some people were more willing to face the hard realities and draw the logical conclusion that the Nazis intended to kill all Jews. From there it was obvious that Jews would only survive by hiding or escaping. Many members of Dutch-Paris started their illegal work in the resistance at that point. They believed that Jews were in mortal danger and decided that they, personally, needed to do something about it.

Some Dutch university students who later joined Dutch-Paris started in the Kindercomité or similar groups dedicated to rescuing Jewish children from deportation. One, an aide at the nursery in the Nazis’ collection and holding point at the Hollandse Schouwburg in Amsterdam, had the agonizing task of convincing parents to surrender their very young children and then helping to smuggle the children out of what was essentially an internment camp.

Others helped Jews of all ages, often multi-generational families, to cross borders and escape. They later put their newly developed illegal skills and networks at the service of other groups of people hunted by the Nazis, such as resisters, Engelandvaarders and aviators.

Add all those clandestine refugees helped by escape lines to the displaced people and refugees forced from their homes by the war, and there were millions of men, women and children, many of them orphans, uprooted from their homes and lives and searching for their lost families when the war finally ended. Because war destroys families.