Why Young Migrants Matter in the History of Knowledge

M any of the approximately 28,000 children who had fled Nazi-dominated central Europe developed “a maturity and initiative far beyond their years,” noted a sociological study in 1941. “Young people, particularly, not only became more mature and more serious, but proved to be able to live up to the exigencies of the time. The necessity to adjust rested in greater initiative and versatility among these victims of oppression.” A 2006 study confirmed these earlyfindingswith extensive statisticalwork and in-depth interviews. Oneman, for example, remembered the period he had spent in transit in England: “I was [sending] advice tomy parents as to what to do and what visas were available. I really knew more than they did about these things. . . . I became a sort of an advisor . . . I did really so much in finding an apartment, signing a lease and all that sort of thing.” Or, as another man observed many decades after escaping the Nazis, “in a way I was the parent and they were the children.” Given the differing methodological approaches and research contexts that produced these observations, the congruence of experience and sociology in 1941 with memory and historico-social science in