Background - The Lake District Holocaust Project

In 1945 the people of Lakeland welcomed three hundred child Holocaust Survivors into their community. The children were to spend a period of recuperation in the Lakes before setting out on new lives. Arriving in the Lake District was described by the children as like being in “Paradise”. It must have seemed so following years of unimaginable horror in the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Occupied Europe.

The Jewish children who came to the Lake District had been liberated in May 1945. They had been discovered in the notorious Theresienstadt ghetto camp near Prague but many had been used as slave labour in many camps across Nazi Occupied Europe for a number of years. The list of names of the camps they had experienced is an A-Z of horror.

Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Warsaw ghetto, Lodz ghetto…..they each had a different story to tell of a different journey. Their discovery in Theresienstadt does not begin to cover their story.

Following liberation, in June 1945 the Home Office finally gave permission for a thousand Jewish orphans aged from eight to sixteen to be brought to the UK for recuperation, and ultimate re-emigration overseas. The Home Office were made aware that it was unlikely that any documents would be available giving proof of age, and the children rescued from concentration camps would most probably have no identification papers of any kind.

With this fact established, three hundred children were moved from
Theresienstadt to Prague and, on 13 August 1945, ten Stirling aircraft of 196 Squadron set off for Prague from the UK to collect the children and other passengers, in order to transport them to the Lake District.

According to immigration officials the first of the Stirling aircraft to arrive at Crosby on Eden from Prague touched down at 5.00pm on 14 August 1945.

From that moment onwards, other aircraft arrived at regular intervals until the final one touched down at 8.45pm. The aircraft carrying baggage was to arrive the following day.

The original plan of placing approximately sixteen children per aircraft and using a total of twenty-two planes for the entire transfer, rather than the final number of eleven, was due to hastening of the transport as bad weather began to close in on Prague after the 14 August.

Each group of children on each aeroplane was accompanied from Prague by between two and six adults per aircraft.

A series of buses was used to transport the children to Windermere, though towards the end army trucks had to be co-opted and the final passengers departed from the airfield at 10.30pm.

Eleven of the total of thirty-five adults who specifically accompanied the children were Polish and German, and had been brought to look after the children at the hostels. Twenty-two more adults on the flights were German, Czech and Polish people, who had come to join relatives in the UK. Interestingly, twelve of these people were over the age of fifty-five.

The museum tells the story of this group of 300 who had suffered the loss of their families and endures the horrors of the Holocaust as they formed friendships with fellow survivors that would become their new ‘family.

The Lake District Holocaust Project is Produced and Managed by Another Space Limited, a registered Charity and Company Limited by Guarantee Incorporated in England. Registered Charity 1122304.
Registered Company 6441350.

Address

Windermere Library,
LA23 2AJ

01539 713151