But after the war the problem of abandoned, lost and homeless children became magnified not just in France but throughout Europe. The devastation had left behind it a continent of displaced orphans and homeless children: some 50,000 in Czechoslovakia, 280,000 in Yugoslavia – statistics which cannot easily convey the individual heartache behind them. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was by 1947 caring for some 500,000 orphans in Germany alone, many of whom had forgotten who they were or where they came from, or never knew, too young to remember anything about their previous lives and often too emotionally fragile to be told. In the summer of 1945 posters had started appearing on the walls of train stations and post offices across Europe, often put there by the Red Cross, showing pictures of babies and small children with the words: ‘Who am I?’ Malnourished, wary, sickly, described by one aid worker as ‘tired, wan, broken little old men and women’, these children became for Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar the symbol of European culture and humanity in disarray. In France, as the war ended, the OSE estimated that there were between five and six thousand Jewish children who were now orphans, whether hidden in non-Jewish homes around the country or over the border in Switzerland or Spain. They needed to be traced, their families and heritage restored.
This was the environment which struck the British novelist Marghanita Laski so profoundly on her frequent post-war trips back to the Paris she loved. She and her husband had not only lived in Paris from 1937 to 1938, they had been married there and knew it well. In addition Laski was well equipped to understand the needs of French orphans at close hand since her own secular, intellectually aware Jewish family had rescued two Jewish refugees from Europe, days before the outbreak of war. Little Boy Lost, the bestselling novel that resulted, was not published until 1949 but it describes an all too chillingly familiar France of 1946 ‘enveloped in a miasma of corruption’ where the rules of the black-market economy predominate. Hilary, the anti-hero who has to decide whether or not to take as his own a child from a chilly Catholic orphanage whose identity cannot be proven, asks his resistance friend Pierre how he copes with constantly wondering what everyone did during the Occupation. Pierre tells him that yes, he wonders, ‘but automatically now and without caring about the answer. I’m tired with “collaborationist” as a term of abuse; we each did under the Germans what we were capable of doing; what that was, was settled long before they arrived.’ Meanwhile, the nuns are weighing up Hilary just as much as he is questioning himself, informing him: ‘You will understand that we must be very, very certain that the child is yours before we allow him to pass into a non-Catholic home.’