During the past month, numerous stories appeared at about the same time in the New York Times. One Times front-page story, January, 31st, had the headline, “29 Syrian Children Die During Freezing Escape from the Islamic State.” A month later, February 26, came this: “Syrian Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down. And ‘Nobody Cares.’” The week before, on February 19th, The Times’s “At War” newsletter, weekly commentaries on war from veterans, scholars, and others, appeared with this headline: “Beyond The World War II WE Know: When Jim Crow Reigned Amid the Rubble of Nazi Germany,” by Alexis Clark (adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and author of “Enemies in Love: A German POW, a Black Nurse and an Unlikely Romance”).

What connects today’s Syrian stories to Professor Clark’s contribution about a segregated US Army occupying Germany after Berlin’s surrender in 1945? In a word, “children.”

With the sad story of Syria’s displaced children already on my mind, Professor Clark’s story led me back to an image in my mother’s small photo album of our time in Europe, the one from which I drew the image in my last post. One photo in that album that I had never displayed before came to mind. Shown here is this mixed-race toddler taken in the late 40s at the orphanage at which my mother worked.

The attached image is just one of several reminders of our time as displaced persons, a pair of the millions looking for peace and homes at that time; it is haunting and thought-provoking, even after these many years.

I scanned it, when I began my “rummaging,” but I didn’t include it in the images I used here because I didn’t understand why it was taken and why my mother kept it or what it might have meant in the scheme of things. In all, questions I could not hope to answer. I wrote to Professor Clark and asked her if the image spoke to her in some way? Did it point to anyone she might have discovered in her research?

She said it did not, but she sent me a link to an obituary she had written a year ago for the New York Times series, “Overlooked No More” obituaries of people who, for whatever reason (race, gender, controversial achievement, etc.), had not receive obituaries in The Times that they might have earned today. The one she sent was entitled: “Overlooked No More: Mabel Grammer, Whose Brown Baby Plan Found Homes for Hundreds.” Professor Clark wrote that Grammar “would run an adoption agency that made it possible for unwanted mixed-race children in Germany to find homes after World War II.”

Continuing:

“They were called “brown babies,” or “mischlingskinder,” a derogatory German term for mixed-race children. And sometimes they were just referred to as mutts.

“They were born during the occupation years in Germany after World War II, the offspring of German women and African-American soldiers. Their fathers were usually transferred elsewhere and their mothers risked social repercussions by keeping them, so the babies were placed in orphanages.

“But when Mabel Grammer, an African-American journalist, became aware of the orphaned children, she stepped in. She and her husband, an army chief warrant officer stationed in Mannheim, and later Karlsruhe, adopted 12 of them, and Grammer found homes for 500 others.”

Perhaps this little child was among them. I can only hope so. And we can only hope for better fortunes for the children in Syria.