The Norwegian foster care system is in the headlines again, this time around involving Czech children. Two brothers were forcibly taken into custody by the authorities in 2011, since when their mother has struggled to secure their return. The President of the Czech Republic commented on the situation by comparing the care system to a Nazi adoption program.

Eva and Joseph Michalak were separated from their sons after their father was accused of abusing the children. However, after a Norwegian court found him innocent of the charge, officials refused to return the children to their parents and quickly arranged for them to be moved to separate foster families.  The story gained  significance in the Czech Republic, and Mrs. Michalak has been persistent in her attempts to reunite with her children for five years. A new wave of public discontent stirred in the Czech Republic yesterday when the country’s president condemned the Norwegian foster care system, comparing it to “Lebensborn” – a Nazi child redistribution program. “Their mother gets to be

with them for 15 minutes twice a year, and she is not allowed to speak Czech to them. The kids are in other words denationalized,” President Milos Zeman told Czech newspaper Blesk. So far there has been no comment from Norway in response.

This is not the first time Norwegian social services have been in the center of an international conflict for removing  children from foreign citizens. Last year, they took a Russian boy after he told his classmates that his mother helped him to pull out a milk-tooth. In the last few years, children have also been extracted from Indian and Polish parents.

It seems that the only reliable way to free children from the influence of the child welfare service is through illegal means. Polish private investigator Kryzstof Rutkowsky is notorious for kidnapping and smuggling children back to their parents and was dubbed “the children’s Rambo” by the media. He already helped to reunite a Polish and a Russian family in a series of masterfully planned “rescue missions.”