Schiedam children on the go

During the Second World War, children were sent to foster homes in other parts of the Netherlands to escape bombardments and starvation. Little was known about the Schiedam children’s broadcasts. In this oral history project, people were interviewed who had been sent as children from Schiedam to other parts of the Netherlands during the war in order to recuperate.

At the beginning of the war, the deployments were organised by the primary schools with the cooperation of the school doctors. During the Hunger Winter in January 1945, the local Interchurch Bureau (IKB) sent out more than 600 children. They were placed with host families in the province for a short or longer period of time where they could leave the war behind for a while. Especially during the Hunger Winter, many children suffered from malnutrition and illness. Not all of those selected for this project were sent as children via the IKB or the National Committee for Children’s Missions (Schiedam). In the winter of 1944/45 many children were also sent out on the initiative of their parents.

This project mainly tried to find out what role religion played in the children’s deportation, especially in those cases where the religion of the host family was not the same as the religion of the foster child. However, unambiguous conclusions on the role of religion cannot be drawn on the basis of the interviews. The IKB considered it important that the relationship between the religions of the Schiedam population was the same as that of the transports. The interviews (2009), however, show that the interviewees had the impression that religion did not matter during the deployments.