Kidnapped by Own Family

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The Jewish children rescued by the Poles during the Holocaust frequently didn't want to return to their own families, and their new Polish families frequently didn't want to returned them - they had to be taken away by force.
This is just one such story:

The Gutmorgens lived in Pultusk before the war. Most likely they escaped the German invasion by going east, to the Soviet-occupied zone. But when the Germans invaded in 1941, most of the family ended up in the Sarny ghetto. That is where they died, killed by German soldiers or Ukrainian policemen, who liquated the ghetto in 1942.
Then 8-year-old Anna was one of a few Jewish children sheltered by Tekla and Franciszek Jankowscy. Her then teenaged brother was with the partisans. Whereabouts of her sister – who survived the war and later went to Israel – are unknown. Jankowski moved to the village of Henrykowo after the war and took Anna with them. In Henrykowo, she was sent to school, from where – as her teacher Henryk Leszczynski wrote down in his memoirs – she was kidnapped a couple of years later.

„H. (the teacher refers to Anna as Hanna) didn’t want to go back to her relative and she ran away afraid of being taken by force. Once she ran to my place and she stayed over the night” – the teacher Leszczynski wrote in his memoirs. The relative mentioned in the memoir is most probably her aunt Guta Szynowloga, a clerk. Guta came to the village a couple of times trying to persuade her niece Anna and her new Polish parents to let Anna live with her. In the village, both Leszczynski and Anna’s school friends knew of this situation.

Thanks to Henryk Leszczynski’s memoirs, we know that she was supported in her decision to stay with the Jankowski family. „Once they came by the school, while H. was at classes. The aunt stayed in the car, whilst two men entered the school. H. hid in the chancellery. One of them showed me his UB (Communist secret police) badge, and wanted to force entrance and look for H., and then I warned him pointing out to armed students“ – wrote Mr. Leszczynski. In the end, Anna’s aunt was able to kidnap her with the help of these two men.

„[The agent] restrained from violence. The Jew followed me, took out a wad of bills and tried to convince me, that I’m not rich and the aunt will give it to me only for getting to talk to H.“ – Henryk’s story continues. He did not take the offer. According to his account, the agents gave up and left the school grounds. „[We] only saw a car passing by, stopping, and then driving on. There were rumours, that someone took money for helping with the kidnapping“ – wrote Henryk Leszczynski.

The girl, Anna Gutmorgen/Jankowska:

Anna_Jankowska.jpg (44.42 KiB) Viewed 395 times

[henryk]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnappin ... y#Post-war
Many of the Polish children kidnapped by the Germans, and raised as Germans, also refused to go back to Poland and their families.

Kidnapping of non-Germanic European children by Nazi Germany (Polish: Rabunek dzieci), part of the Generalplan Ost (GPO), involved taking children regarded as "Aryan-looking" from the rest of Europe and moving them to Nazi Germany for the purpose of Germanization, or indoctrination into becoming culturally German.

At more than 200,000 victims, occupied Poland had the largest proportion of children taken.[2][5] An estimated 400,000 children were abducted throughout Europe.[1]

The aim of the project was to acquire and "Germanize" children with purportedly Aryan-Nordic traits, who were considered by Nazi officials to be descendants of German settlers that had emigrated to Poland. Those labeled "racially valuable" were forcibly Germanized in centers and then sent to German families and SS Home Schools.[6]

Post-war[edit]

The extent of the program became clear to Allied forces over the course of months, as they found groups of "Germanized" children and became aware that many more were in the German population.[35] Locating these children turned up their stories of forcible instruction in the German language and how the failures were killed.[36] Teams were constituted to search for the children, a particularly important point when dealing with institutions, where a single investigator could only interview a few children before all the rest were coached to provide false information.[37] Many children had to be lured into speaking the truth; as for instance complimenting their German and asking how long they had spoken it, and only when told that a nine-year-old had spoken German for four years, pointing out that they must have spoken before then, whereupon the child could be brought to admit to having spoken Polish.[38] Some children suffered emotional trauma when they were removed from their adoptive German parents, often the only parents they remembered, and returned to their biological parents, when they no longer remembered Polish, only German.[1] The older children generally remembered Poland; ones as young as ten had forgotten much, but could often be reminded by such things as Polish nursery rhymes; the youngest had no memories that could be recalled.[1]

Allied forces made efforts to repatriate them.[39] However, many children, particularly Polish and Yugoslavian who were among the first taken, declared on being found that they were German.[39] Russian and Ukrainian children, while not gotten to this stage, still had been taught to hate their native countries and did not want to return.[39] While many foster parents voluntarily brought forth well-cared-for children, other children proved to be abused or used for labor, and still others went to great efforts to hide the children.[40]

After the war, The United States of America v. Ulrich Greifelt, et al., or the RuSHA Trial, the eighth of the twelve Nuremberg Trials, dealt with the kidnapping of children by the Nazis.[41] Many children testified, although many of their parents were afraid to let them return to Germany.[42] From 1947 to 1948, the Nuremberg Trials ruled that the abductions, exterminations, and Germanization constituted genocide.[43]

Only 10 to 15 percent of those abducted returned to their homes.[44] When Allied effort to identify such children ceased, 13,517 inquiries were still open, and it was clear that German authorities would not be returning them.[45]

Today in Germany, it is believed that hundreds of thousands of Germans might be descended from kidnapped Polish children. However it is very unlikely that people are aware of having hidden Polish ancestry, and cases of having any such knowledge are extremely rare.

After the war, a memorial plate was made in Lublin dedicated to railway workers who tried to save Polish children from German captivity.[46]