Four members of the orphans transport pose with a Union Jack soon after their arrival in England.
Overview
- Caption
- Four members of the orphans transport pose with a Union Jack soon after their arrival in England.
Among those pictured are Polek Gastfreund (right); Jerry Herszberg (second from the left); and Felix Berger (left). - Date
-
Circa 1945 - 1946
- Locale
- England
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Paul Gast
- 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.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Paul Gast
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Paul Gast (born Polek Gastfreund) is the son of Szlama and Mina Gastfreund. He was born on November 16, 1929 in Lodz, where his father owned a textile factory. During the German occupation the family was forced into the ghetto, where Polek's father was killed soon after it was sealed off in the winter of 1940. Polek worked in a ghetto metal shop almost until the liquidation of the ghetto. In August 1944 Polek and his mother were deported to Auschwitz, where Mina perished. Polek remained in Auschwitz for two or three months before being transferred to Braunschweig, where he was put to work at the Büssing Werke trucking factory. From there he was taken to Watenstedt, and later to Ravensbrück and Wöbbelin. Polek was liberated in Wöbbelin on May 2, 1945 at the age of 16. Soon after the end of the war he returned to Lodz to look for surviving family members, but found no one. Polek then decided to go to Palestine and proceeded to Prague on the first leg of his journey. In Prague he learned that England had agreed to admit a large group of child survivors and that such a group was forming in Theresienstadt. Polek changed his plans and proceeded to Theresienstadt, where he joined the first group of Jewish orphans leaving for Britain. He arrived in Windermere on August 14, 1945.
- Record last modified:
- 2003-10-08 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1120910
