German version ...

"... Repatriation trains generally left with great fanfare, with branches and flags adorning the cars, and songs competing with the rumble of the locomotive. These Polish youths were typical of the joyful return. Some others went back apprehensively, however."

It was one of the UNRRA's main duties to return the "Displaced"-people to their homelands.

These children may have lost their parents during the war or at least have been separated from them. Beginning in 1945 several trains departed Wildflecken with the destination Poland. When the Polish refugees heard of the installation of a communist regime in Poland they refused to return there. Even some of those who went back to Poland returned to the german camps shortly after arrival in Poland. This was not the country they left some years before.

Source of pictures: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, all rights reserved.
Text Heinz Leitsch, Germany

© Heinz Leitsch

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