"Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives ... The lost children ... brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the effort of everyone -- from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers -- to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity"--Jacket.