Children’s Homes as Refugee Spaces: Child Refugees and Institutional Care in Socialist Czechoslovakia

Abstract This article examines the role of children’s homes in socialist Czechoslovakia as temporary humanitarian spaces for child refugees fleeing the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) or the Korean War (1950–1953). It challenges the conventional ideological framing of socialist residential care as a tool of social engineering. Instead, it examines the everyday agency of refugee children, as manifest through their experience of space and time. The analysis draws on archival materials, oral interviews, and refugee literature to illuminate the personal choices and coping strategies of these children in the context of socialist education. The refugee children’s homes are conceptualized as socially constructed spaces that required a healthy political and physical environment for the children’s presumed successful development. By situating these facilities geographically and spatially and contextualizing them historically within a broader continuum of care, the analysis elucidates the underlying issues associated with the postwar reconstruction process.