Lonely Yule for Deserted Children : East Bloc: Hospices overflow with hundreds of youngsters abandoned when parents fled to West.

EAST BERLIN —  For some East German children, this Christmas will be a lonely one: They have been abandoned by parents who have left for the West.

East Germany has always made a point of celebrating the holiday season with brightly decorated markets--trees, lights, toys, rides--to lift the flagging spirits of those living in the Communist state. This year is no exception. But a special effort to surround a group of youngsters with Christmas cheer is being made at the Dr. Janucz Korczak children’s home in the Lichtenberg neighborhood of East Berlin.

The home is an orphanage for children without parents and for those whose parents, for various reasons, are unable to care for them. There are 240 children in the Korczak home, one of several such institutions in the capital.

The government-run hospice is named after a Polish physician. He was a Jew who volunteered to accompany children during World War II from the Warsaw Ghetto to the dreaded Treblinka concentration camp, where he was put to death along with the children.

“We have five kids whose parents up and left them,” said Dagmar Raeder, the outgoing assistant director of the home, housed in a functional-looking building in the middle of a bleak, high-rise residential district.

The abandoned children are two 4-year-olds, Suzanne and Nicole, 8-year-old Mike, 10-year-old Thomas and 13-year-old Nancy.

“The older ones know their parents fled to the West, and they just can’t understand how they could be left behind,” Raeder said. “Frankly, neither can I.

“We get phone calls from neighbors saying the children have been left behind, so we bring them here,” she said.

In Nancy’s case, her parents took two younger children with them but left her behind.

Thomas told Raeder, referring to his parents: “They have gone behind the (Berlin) Wall.”

The hopeful presumption is that some parents wanted to flee and begin a new life in West Germany and did not want to subject their children to the dangers of escape or to the rigors of adjustment.

These parents are expected to try to collect their children later. Even so, the youngsters undergo a psychological shock, Raeder said.

Other parents, according to the staff, were negligent in any event, and the opportunity to flee East Germany relieved them of family responsibilities.

Officials estimate that 107 children have been left behind in the city’s facilities by migrating parents. Many other children whose parents went West are thought to be staying with relatives, who hope the parents will pick up the children when they are established in the West.

The head of East Berlin’s child care office, Herbert Tatus, estimates that several hundred children have been left behind by departing parents.

Dr. Klaus Rueder, director of the Korczak home, said that parents who leave their children behind “are people with too-high expectations of their own lives and not enough responsibility.”

At the Korczak home, playrooms and bedrooms are gaily decorated with Christmas themes: fir wreaths, pine cones, tinsel, ornaments--a bright contrast to the damp, gray weather outside.

In one playroom, five children--including Suzanne and Nicole in pinafores--sat at a table with a teacher, partaking of a traditional snack of the season: cold, weak tea and stollen, a Christmastime children’s cake.

They played with a bunny they called “Mickey Mouse,” and one child asked the teacher if “ mutti “ (mother) was coming to see her.

“The children seem not to want to talk in detail about their missing parents,” Raeder said. “But we can see they are lonely and confused by the sudden absence.”