If you read the last few posts about families in Dutch-Paris, you may have wondered why there is hardly anything in the documents about the children left behind to fend for themselves when their parents were arrested for resistance. After all, that would not go unnoticed or undiscussed today.

I suspect that there are two main parts to the reason. In the first place, the Second World War traumatized the entire continent. When it ended, millions were dead. Millions were displaced and living in refugee camps. There were entire refugee camps of orphaned children. There wasn’t enough food, or fuel, or clothing. Entire cities had been laid waste. So a few kids who were living on their own in their family homes in a part of Europe that was still standing were hardly the biggest problem or the greatest tragedy around. It was a tragedy for them, but, comparatively speaking, they were doing pretty well.

The people who noticed these kids on their own were connected to them in some way as neighbors, relatives or other members of Dutch-Paris. They just helped them out without making a fuss about it. Being a victim was definitely not fashionable at the end of the war, especially not among the Dutch. People were talking about other things, like the threat of Stalin moving the Red Army all the way to the Atlantic, or reconstruction, or how to punish collaborators.

The second reason has to do with how and why those documents were created and gathered in the immediate postwar period. That has to do with politics and bureaucracies. Those vary by country, so this is a very general statement. Essentially, postwar governments in western Europe based their legitimacy on being heirs to the Resistance. They therefore took care of resisters. The documents in the archives were gathered and written to determine who were resisters and to administer resistance veteran benefits.

However, the definition of resister and resistance was narrower then than it is now. A man who wielded a gun in the partisans? Definitely a resister entitled to all the benefits. A teenager who took some messages and then lived alone when his parents were arrested? Not really because the parents will count as resisters and get the benefits. That’s not to say that war orphans didn’t get benefits, just that they came under the label of orphans or civilian war victims, not resisters.

Interestingly, the recognized leaders of resistance networks did have some leeway to say who was or was not a resister in their networks. So in theory at least, the leader of Dutch-Paris could have designated all these kids as resisters. He did not. But he barely recognized his own wife in the documents despite telling the Queen of the Netherlands that his wife had played a crucial role in Dutch-Paris. He did, however, write a lot of letters and reports to make sure they got their war orphan benefits.

The short version of all that is that, at the time, the people gathering information were interested in establishing that the parents who had been arrested were resisters. They didn’t much care about the kids. And why would they? The kids had survived. They were fine.