'To Build and Be Built’: Jewish Displaced Children and Youth in Post-War Italy, 1943–48

International historiography has almost exclusively emphasised the strategic role of Italy as a stepping stone to Eretz Israel for thousands of Holocaust Jewish survivors at the end of World War II. Very little is known about their lives in the refugee camps, their interaction with the rescue network or the extent to which the experience of displacement influenced their future. This chapter focuses on a specific category of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) in Italy: children living in the peculiar context of collective farms (hachsharot in Hebrew) established starting from 1944 in liberated Italy by Palestinian Jewish soldiers serving in the Allied Army. Seen as a means for restoring DPs’ purposefulness and an efficient way to promote a form of active welfare, hachsharot essentially were thought to educate Jewish youth about Zionism and train them for their final migration to Palestine. Drawing on a wide range of unedited sources, this chapter explores connections and tensions among the organisations involved in taking care of Jewish children and youth in Italy, the relations of power between ‘rescuers’ and ‘recipients’, and the political and humanitarian discourse behind collective farms and children’s homes