Can the Child Speak? Uncovering the Childhood Voice in the Canadian War Orphan Project, August 1947 to February 1952
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between August 1947 and February 1952, Canada received approximately 1,100 young Holocaust survivors through the War Orphan Project led by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC).These survivors serve a crucial role in forging an image of Canada's prompt and compassionate response to the plight of European Jews after the Holocaust.However, such a celebratory narrative, reproduced in the historiography, obscures Canada's significant history of antisemitism and resistance to hosting Jewish refugees.This thesis will address how the complex resettlement experiences of the War Orphans nuances this historiographical consensus.Namely, it will question the Canadian state's failed attempt to mould these young survivors into archetypal model child immigrants using the foster family model, an aspect of the resettlement process thus far neglected in the historiography.It will advocate for a reorientation of methodology surrounding agency to one that historicizes acts of youthful autonomy and youngsters' contributions to historical change over time.More precisely, I will utilize age as a primary category of analysis to illustrate the complexities surrounding the resettlement of the War Orphans in Canada.Part I will analyze the rhetoric and visual materials of the CJC August and September 1947 campaign to attract foster families and donations to illustrate the preferences of Canadian Jewish families and lay out the expectations they held over the presentation of the War Orphans.Part II will analyze the information given by CJC social workers in the individual War Orphans case files to illustrate how these expectations held by foster parents directly impacted the development of successful foster family relationships, subsequently nuancing the historiographical consensus surrounding the success of their resettlement.It is crucial to reread the case files written and produced for the adults running the project against the grain to uncover the voices of the orphans during their resettlement.Part III further utilizes the case files of the War Orphans to begin to illustrate how they could dictate their course of resettlement, challenging the historiographical narrative that the War Orphans were passive victims.Can the Child Speak?Uncovering the Childhood Voice in the Canadian War Orphan Project, August 1947 to February 1952
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".