Children and family have been central to the institution of the concentration camp from its beginnings 120 years ago. Wikipedia has now added the notorious American border detention centres to its list of concentration camps, and the #FamiliesBelongTogether Twitter hashtag has brought up frequent comparisons.
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The merits of the comparison between detention centres and concentration camps have been debated elsewhere, but can we learn anything from this dreadful history of children behind barbed wire, even as the Trump administration finally moved to end the practice?
The British constructed camps during the 1899-1902 South African War in order to divide families. They hoped that Boer men who were fighting British forces would give up once they discovered that their wives and children were held in camps.
Similar to the Trump administration’s apparent hope that the breakup of families would deter unwanted migration, the British sought to deter Boer fighters. British parliamentarians critical of the policy labelled these “concentration camps,” alluding to the Spanish policy of the “reconcentration” of civilians during the Spanish-American War (1898).
Conditions in the British-run camps were horrific, particularly for children, with mortality rates upwards of 25 per cent. An epidemic of measles accounted for roughly 40 per cent of childhood deaths in these camps, and other diseases such as typhus and dysentery were also devastating.
Families broken up in former Soviet Union
The Soviet Union’s system of camps that reached their peak during Joseph Stalin’s rule from the 1930s to the 1950s also reveals the destruction of families. While mass arrests broke up the family, and children of “enemies of the people” were separated from their parents, there were also many children in the Gulag itself.
Prison camps developed an infrastructure that, on the surface, supported pregnancy and childbirth. There were maternity wards in some camp clinics, as well as nurseries, and pregnant women and nursing mothers officially received increased rations.
In practice, the system was regularly a nightmare. Children born in the camps were separated from their mothers, who only managed to see them at set times for nursing.
Hava Volovich, whose own daughter died in the camps, remembers that hundreds of camp children died each year, meaning that there were “plenty of empty beds in the infants’ shelter even though the birth rate in the camps was relatively high.”
At the age of two, many of the surviving children were sent either to orphanages or to relatives — a forced redistribution of children away from their parents, who, as Gulag prisoners, were at best stigmatized, and at worst seen as a major threat to Soviet society.
The Gulag also held camps for young offenders, where teenagers worked as forced labourers and faced horrific living conditions.