Child evacuees in the Creuse: A Summary

From the spring of 1943, thousands of children from the industrial suburbs of Paris were evacuated away from the capital because of food shortages and the increasingly heavy Allied air raids. Around 8,500 of these children were sent to the rural département of the Creuse, where they were billeted with families. There has been little historical interest in the evacuation of French children during the Second World War, and my research for this project has made use of archival sources and oral history interviews to fill this gap. I contend that although many of these evacuees did not experience combat, violence or persecution, their evacuation to the Creuse had a profound impact on their lives thereafter.

This Working Paper is not intended as a scholarly analysis (this can be found in publications forthcoming elsewhere), but instead provides an accessible summary of the content of the oral history interviews conducted by the author in 2017.