Save the (workers') children

In the social melting pot of postimperial transformation, children in Hungary’s capital city suffered in the early 1920s from hunger, displacement, unstable housing and precarious living conditions. Beyond this, working-class mothers in Budapest’s poverty dwellings were reported to leave their homes in the early morning and only return late in the evening; thus, their children were judged to suffer additionally from serious neglect. As the dire situation of many families rendered the particular vulnerability of working-class children visible, the humanitarian worker Rózsi Vajkai, the commissioner of the Save the Children International Union (SCIU) in Budapest at the time, responded to these urgent needs and, with financial and administrative support from the SCIU, opened various children’s day nurseries and kindergartens in Budapest’s slums. With the placement of the most deprived children in these so-called homes, the SCIU wished to prevent the neglect of children from the most disadvantaged class. Through a microstudy of the discourses and practices related to these care facilities, this chapter investigates larger questions of the international – and particularly transnational – dimension of humanitarian child relief in postwar East Central Europe. It argues that these children’s homes served as a local experiment of transnational humanitarianism. While humanitarianism turned into an international endeavour at the time, in the case of child relief in Budapest its strength lay in its transnational and reciprocal dimension. Engaging with international reports and visuals of the SCIU as well as the Hungarian contemporaneous discourse about Budapest’s SCIU ‘homes’, the chapter seeks to uncover how international and humanitarian notions of children’s relief were put into practice through the joint effort of international and local child welfare workers.

Recently published in: "Humanitarian mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe. Local, national and international perspectives”

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