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Hey, history lovers.

I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod.

A show about the past.

Rediscovered.

One Friday in June of 1940, in a southeastern village in England called Lee-on-C, the area's

children brought home notes from school. The notes said that all children would be evacuated

from the village that weekend. The schools would shut down immediately. One of those children

to be evacuated was named Pam Hobbs, and almost 80 years later she can still remember the day the note came home.

Hobbs was 10 years old at the time. She packed her belongings into burlap sandbags. Then she and her sister were placed on a train and sent away to the English countryside.

Hobbs wouldn't see her parents again for two years.

The sisters were just two of the millions of children in England

who were evacuated from cities and towns during World War II.

The mass evacuations, called Operation Pied Piper, were part of a plan by the

U.K. government to keep children safe from German air raids while their parents stayed behind

to help with war efforts. The move started in earnest in 1939, when more than 3 million children were removed from London and other cities in the first four days of evacuations alone.

There, the children were safer from the German bombings during the Blitz that would ultimately claim the lives of around 40,000 British civilians, nearly half of whom lived in London.

But the well-intentioned operation had an unexpected and terrible side effect.

The separations left the children with long-term trauma that was in many cases as severe as if they had stayed behind and faced the bombs.

In her memoir, Pam Hobbs remembers it as her first time knowing what it was like to feel unwanted.

She and her sister were ultimately deposited

...