Event History
After the liberation of the concentration camps, the British philanthropist, Leonard Montefiore, organized a campaign to bring young survivors to Britain. In June 1945 the British Home Office approved a plan to transport one thousand orphans to Britain for recuperation before their resettlement elsewhere. The program was paid for with funds raised by the Care of Children from Concentration Camps organization that was headquartered at the Bloomsbury House in London and chaired by Montefiore. The first group of three hundred orphans was brought from Theresienstadt to Prague and then flown to England on Lancaster bombers. They arrived on August 14, 1945. Though only children below the age of sixteen qualified for the transport, the group actually included several seventeen and eighteen-year-olds who had falsified their ages on their applications. Since very few young children survived the camps, all but thirty of the orphans were over the age of twelve. After landing in England the children were housed at a hostel in Windermere, where they received religious and secular instruction and medical treatment. The second group of orphans arrived in Southampton in November 1945, followed by groups in February and March 1946. The final group of orphans left Prague in April 1946. They stayed in Taverny, France for six weeks before coming to England in June. Despite considerable effort, the program's officers never found a full one thousand orphans who qualified for admission. In all, 732 children were brought to England. Though commonly called "The Boys," the group included eighty girls. All but a dozen were completely orphaned by the war. Soon after their arrival the children were regrouped by religious and political affiliation and sent to separate hostels for the ultra-orthodox, orthodox, religious Zionists and secular Zionists. By the fall of 1946 the program was running into financial trouble. Funding was low and most of the children had no prospects for moving elsewhere as originally intended. In 1947 the orphans were informed that they had to find employment and seek their own housing arrangements. To help maintain their social network, which had become a substitute for the families they had lost, the members of the orphans transport established the Primrose Jewish Youth Club on June 6, 1946. Financed by private donations, the Primrose Club provided a venue with a kosher dining facility where "the Boys" could continue to meet regularly. The club remained in existence until 1949 when it lost its lease. Of the 732 members of the orphans transport, approximately half settled permanently in England. The others moved to Israel, the United States and Canada.
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142.
Biography
Hershy (now Herman) Zelovic is the son of Moric (Moishe) and Giza (Golda) Zelovic. He was born on December 25, 1928 in Mukacevo (Transcarpathia), where his father was in the transport business. Hershy had seven siblings: Malka (b. 1908), Ziporah (b. 1914), Martin (b. 1921), Civia (b. 1923), Willie (b. 1924), Sarah (b. 1925) and Etta (b. 1929). In April 1944 the Zelovic family was forced into the newly established ghetto in Mukacevo. They remained there for only one month before being deported to Auschwitz. Hershy's parents, sister Malka, and niece were murdered soon after their arrival in the camp. Hershy and Willie remained in Auschwitz less than two weeks before being sent with a group of prisoners to a labor camp on the site of the destroyed Warsaw ghetto, where they were put to work packing salvageable building materials for shipment to Germany. With the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising on August 1, 1944, the Jewish forced laborers were marched to Kutno and then transported by train to Germany. Hershy and Willie were taken to one of the Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau, where they were put to work constructing underground factories. As American troops approached in the spring of 1945, the prisoners were packed into open railcars to be taken to Dachau. Before they could leave, however, the train came under Allied bombardment and several of the prisoners took flight into the woods, Hershey and Willie among them. The following day they were spotted by German guards, who delivered them to the local mayor. However, when the mayor heard that the prisoners were infected with typhoid, he released them and pointed them in the direction of the American front lines. Hershy and Willie hid in a hayloft in Schwabhausen until the Americans arrived one week later. After liberation Hershy was sent to the St. Ottilien hospital to recuperate. In June the brothers returned to Mukacevo. After finding their sisters Civia, Sarah and Etta, all five siblings moved to Liberec (Bohemia). In April 1946 Hershy and Etta joined an orphans transport to England. Willie accompanied his siblings on the first leg of their journey to France. There he learned that some of the orphans who had registered for the transport had not shown up and quickly assumed the name of one of the missing boys. Thus in June 1946 three Zelovic orphans arrived in England. After marrying Renate Wenglowitz in London in 1951, Hershy immigrated to the United States in May 1952. Hershy's other siblings, Sarah, Civia and Martin, later immigrated to Palestine, where they joined another sister, Ziporah, who had been living there since 1937.
