During WWII, a number of Jewish parents were able to hide their children with Polish families for safekeeping. Many of these parents did not survive the Holocaust and their children were orphaned. For those who survived, finding and reclaiming their children was often very difficult. In some cases, the children had bonded with their second families and experienced emotional turbulence when reclaimed by relatives or Jewish organizations. Joanna Michlic will discuss the hardships and complicated process of recovering Jewish children in early postwar Poland.

Joanna Michlic is the Director of the Project on Families, Children and the Holocaust at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. She received her doctorate and master’s degree in modern European and Jewish history at the University of London, and her bachelor’s in Slavonic Studies at Lodz University in Poland. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University and at Yad Vashem, both in Jerusalem, and was an Associate Professor of History at Lehigh University. At Lehigh, she was also the first Chair of The Holocaust and Ethical Values. Her books include Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present and Neighbors Response – co-edited with Antony Polonsky. She is currently working on The Social History of Jewish Children in Poland: Survival and Identity,1945-1949, and The Memory of the Holocaust in the Post-Communist Europe.