Expert advisor of the Institute of Anthropology, Jelena Seferović, PhD, started researching archival material during September in the Croatian State Archives and in the state archives in Zagreb and Sisak on the activity of certain children’s homes located in Central Croatia in the period from 1945 to 1950. So far, research has included documentation related to the Josipovac Children’s Home in Zagreb and several children’s homes in the area of Sisak and Banovina. These institutions began operating in the early 1940s, with the Children’s Home Josipovac developed from the City Shelter for Children, whose foundation dates back to 1909.
During the Second World War and immediately after its end, there was an urgent need to open an increasing number of children’s homes with the aim of institutionalizing children and young people who had lost their parents and guardians.
However, despite the tendencies of the competent authorities, a certain number of war orphans were not registered. Judging by the archives, some children were taken from the camp during the occupation and were subsequently concealed and presented as members of their immediate and extended families. In many cases, they didn’t even know they were someone else’s. However, the researcher’s intention is not only to collect factual facts about the observed social phenomenon, but also to consider the way of presenting data on war orphans recorded in their personal files from a cultural anthropological perspective. This refers to an in-depth analysis of the content of children’s application forms and descriptions of everyday life found in the diaries kept by educators.
Of particular interest were the records of the children’s memories of their home, family and homeland. There was no official section for the mentioned data, but the educators entered it on their own initiative and called it “Memory from home”. It is these stories about their memories of childhood and growing up before coming to children’s homes that will be the focus of further archival research. In addition, for better understand the political and socio-economic context, the selected topics will analyze social policies related to the protection of war orphans in Republic of Croatia, guidelines for treatment of children and youth placed in children’s homes, as well as articles on their daily lives. which were published in the daily newspapers of the time.
Unfortunately, there is no recorded exact year of the photos or name. It is known that the first one dates somewhere between the two world wars and shows the users of the home and the heads of the dormitory. The second was made sometime after 1945 and shows home users after they were given humanitarian aid.
