Leoben Children’s Centre

Who ran the home

Responsibility changed hands more than once. UNRRA opened the home in November 1945; from June 1947 it came back under British administration with IRO participation and was run from the camp at Trofaiach, which also supplied its food and fuel; the British handed it to Austria in stages in November 1949 and June 1950. The January 1947 memorandum used here was written by W. C. Collings, officer in charge of the children’s centre at Leoben.

Rooms for playing and learning

The February 1947 newspaper account describes bright rooms, separate dining and play spaces, and a kindergarten. Colourful paper decorations covered the walls. Staff included Austrian carers, and many residents were very young: most were between two and four years old. The reporter encountered children having an afternoon meal together around a large table.

The report explains that children reached the home from Austrian households after wartime separation. Some had been removed from their families under Germanisation policies; others were children of deported workers. Ukrainian and Yugoslav children were the largest groups in the home at the time of the visit.

A class was set up inside the home and was attended by fifteen children. Schools in camps under Allied administration were treated by the Austrian state as quasi-extraterritorial and handled as private schools without public status; from 1 January 1950 they were taken over by the federal authorities and soon dissolved, and the children went to the public schools of their district.

Children taking part in decisions

An UNRRA memorandum from January 1947 describes a meeting at which children discussed repatriation to Yugoslavia. They agreed that children with parents or close relatives there should return if willing, and elected a five-member committee of older children to examine the cases. Its chairman represented a group from Ramsau and its secretary a group from Lienz.

The committee first identified 32 children with family connections in Yugoslavia. About half initially wished to return and half did not. Interviews recorded the objections of reluctant children; repeated discussions followed. The officer’s report says that further family information emerged and eventually 46 children agreed to repatriation. This is the administrator’s account of a particular group’s decision-making, rather than a record of the wishes or destinations of every child in the home.

A changing home

The figures preserved in different records describe different moments and purposes. The 1947 visitor counted approximately 60 children. The archival study gives accommodation capacity of 58 in its account of the home’s later administration. Neither figure is a count of Ukrainian children alone.

Other records give further moments. A British list of Styrian camps drawn up in November 1947 records 111 people at the Children’s Home in Leoben on the September count. The compiled camp register gives about 100 residents, mostly children, in July 1946, describes the home as an IRO orphanage for seventy, and notes that from February 1948 only IRO-eligible children were admitted. At the handover of June 1950 Stieber gives about fifty children. None of these is a count of Ukrainian children.

Supplies and the final years

The home appears among the new facilities in the Styrian camp accounts for 1946. It depended on the larger camp at Trofaiach for food and fuel, connecting a small residential institution with the regional relief network. Its principal residents were children without parents.

On 19 June 1950 the home passed into Austrian administration and staffing was reduced. Historian Gabriela Stieber concludes that it probably closed soon afterwards because it is absent from the Interior Ministry’s 1951 list of Styrian camps. That sequence establishes a transfer of responsibility and a likely period of closure, without inventing a precise final day.

The compiled register resolves part of what happened next: from June 1950 the remaining children were taken over by the IRO children’s homes at Bad Schallerbach and at Ried im Innkreis, both in Upper Austria, and the entries for those two homes record the same transfer from Leoben. That gives the children a destination rather than leaving the closure as a blank.

Photographs and surviving records

A photograph dated 1947 shows a large group assembled outside the children’s home beneath an UNRRA emblem. It preserves the institution’s public face, while the memorandum and newspaper report describe what happened inside: meals, play, attempts to recover family connections and decisions with lasting consequences for children’s lives.