Resilience
Children in War
Yesterday as today, the first silent victims of conflict
In every war, there are children. They do not fight, they make no decisions — and yet they bear the consequences of conflict longer than anyone: throughout their entire lives, and sometimes beyond, passing them on to their own children.
Children of civilians or of military personnel, orphans, hidden children, displaced children, or simply children who grew up in the silence of a broken parent: this page is dedicated to them. Because understanding what they go through — yesterday as today — is the first step towards supporting them.
War orphans and wards of the Nation
The First World War left behind nearly one million orphans in France alone. For them, the Republic created an unprecedented status in 1917: that of ward of the Nation (pupille de la Nation). The State committed to ensuring their protection, education and future, in recognition of their fathers' sacrifice.
This status still exists today. It now protects children of military personnel killed in action, as well as children of terrorism victims. More than a century after its creation, it echoes a simple truth: when a parent falls, it is a child that the Nation must help to stand again.
Our founder is himself a descendant of a ward of the Nation: Paul, two years old when his father Eugène fell at the front in 1914-18. Called up in turn in 1939 and a prisoner for six years, Paul was called "Monsieur" by his own son on his return. Two generations of childhood stolen by war: it is from this story that our association was born.
The hidden children of the Holocaust
During the Second World War, thousands of Jewish children survived in France thanks to families, villages and networks who hid them at the risk of their own lives. Separated from their parents, changing their names, their schools, sometimes their apparent religion, they learned to stay silent in order to survive.
Many never saw their parents again — deported and murdered. As adults, these "hidden children" long carried their story in silence, before bearing witness, decades later, so that their experience might illuminate the generations that followed.
Their story speaks two essential truths: the absolute vulnerability of children in war, and the power of solidarity — that of the Righteous Among the Nations, who proved that even in the darkest night, protecting a child remains possible.
Today's displaced children
History is repeating itself before our eyes. Since 2022, the war in Ukraine has forced millions of children onto the roads: separated from their father who remained at the front, torn from their school, their language, their friends. Others are living under bombardment, in shelters, stripped of any ordinary childhood.
Like the orphans of 1914-18, like the hidden children of the Holocaust, they carry wounds that cannot be seen: fear, grief, uprooting, the guilt of having survived. And as in the past, hands are being extended: host families, schools, associations.
This is the purpose of our Motanka project: every doll created in our workshops supports the Ukrainian association Voices of Children, which provides psychological support to children affected by the war.
Children of military personnel: growing up with absence
We think of soldiers. We rarely think of their children. And yet, growing up in a military family during times of conflict means living with repeated absence, the fear of the telegram, and sometimes the return of a parent transformed by what they have lived through: silences, anger, nightmares, distance.
These children are not victims of bombs — but they are victims of war. A parent's invisible wounds become, without words, those of the whole family. This is what specialists call transgenerational trauma: suffering that is passed down when it cannot be spoken.
Recognising these children as victims in their own right is at the heart of our mission: whether children of civilians or of military personnel, no child should have to carry the weight of a war alone.
From one war to the next, the faces change — the wounds of children remain the same.
Understanding them is already the beginning of healing them.