The mothers faced a difficult choice: watch your child waste away or hand your baby over to complete strangers all the way in the north of the country? What was unique about this place is that the mothers got a letter almost every week describing the progress of their little ones: first words, teething, et cetera. Lots of those letters were saved, along with the entire administration of the Babyhuis, which was just one of the initiatives in a large-scale operation to save children during the Hongerwinter (Winter of Starvation). Primarily through the help provided by lots of churches, around 50,000 children from cities in the west of the Netherlands were cared for in the northern provinces. This most likely saved the lives of thousands.