Doina Anca Cretu is Assistant Professor in Modern European History at University of WarwickMichal Frankl was Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project “Unlikely Refuge?”. Currently, he is the head of the Prague Department “Knowledge and Participation” of the Leibniz-Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe.

• Introduction: humanitarian mobilization in Centraland Eastern Europe Doina Anca Cretu and Michal FranklPart I Local humanitarianism1 Save the (workers’) children: humanitarian kindergartens inBudapest’s slums after the First World War Friederike Kind-Kovács2 Ethnicizing aid: Jews and Christians inside and outside thesocial care system in interwar Lubartów Franciszek Zakrzewski3 When the ‘socialist good life’ met its match: austerity andhumanitarian crisis in 1980s Romania Cristian Capotescu4 Self-organized care for older people in East Germany: localhumanitarianism and post-1989 transformations Maren HachmeisterPart II National humanitarianism5 The Czechoslovak Red Cross and refugee children from Greeceand North Korea Nikola Tohma6 Refugees in the ‘better Germany’: humanitarian aid to Greekrefugee children in the early German Democratic Republic Julia ReinkePart III Transnational humanitarianism7 How to leave Central Europe? Transnational, humanitarianstate building and the post-Habsburg transition Gábor Egry8 Western perceptions of Czechoslovak humanitarian interactionsunder Nazi occupation, 1938–1939 Laura Brade9 ‘The same spirit that led me into war’: Italian and transnationalhumanitarian actors and post-revolutionary Russia Ruth Nattermann10 Religious humanitarianism: the World Council of Churchesfor refugees in Austria in 1956 and 1968 Sarah KnollIndex