“It was not what I thought it would be like,” he recalled. It was 15 August 1945, the day of Alice Goldberger’s 48th birthday. Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife, died there of tuberculosis in 1918. From then on the inmates were gradually transferred to Germany and Terezín was increasingly used as a hub for the forced migration of Germans from the Czech lands into Germany proper. These were primarily Czechs, later other nationals, for instance citizens of the former Soviet Union, Poles, Germans, and Yugoslavs. The roughly 150,000 children under the age of 18 who survived had seen periods in hiding, in ghettoes, and in forced labour and concentration camps, and many found that they were orphans at the war’s end. Published in 1951, the paper remains to this day a core text in the field of child psychology. If you subscribe to BBC History Magazine Print or Digital Editions then you can unlock 10 years’ worth of archived history material fully searchable by Topic, Location, Period and Person. In May 1945, philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, one of the founders of the Central British Fund (the key aid agency overseeing the children’s rescue, which exists today as the humanitarian and development charity World Jewish Relief) had gone to Paris, where he had seen some of the first liberated concentration camp survivors. [3] This attack occurred two days after Austria and Prussia had agreed to make peace, but the Theresienstadt garrison was ignorant of the news.[4]. “We began to worry after so many planes of youths arrived that there would be no small children,” Goldberger later wrote. Most of the prisoners were arrested for various acts of resistance to the Nazi regime; among them were the family members and supporters of the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich. Early in 1946, two additional groups of young child survivors arrived: some were survivors of Auschwitz, and some had survived the war in hiding and in orphanages. The camp and prison were liberated on 9 May 1945 by the Soviet Army.[5]. A joint project between Portraits of Honor: Our Michigan Holocaust Survivors, the Program for Holocaust Survivors and Families, and the Voice/Vision Archive. The Bulldogs Bank toddlers also joined the older children after a year. Zdenka Husserl was born in Prague in February 1939; her parents were called Helena and Pavel. In 1946, Alice received some surprising news: Avigdor’s mother had survived and was living in Austria. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there, including 15,000 children. In the times of Austria–Prussia rivalry, it was meant to secure the bridges across the Ohře and Elbe Rivers against Prussian troops invading the Bohemian lands from neighbouring Saxony. It held primarily Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as tens of thousands of Jews deported chiefly from Germany and Austria, as well as hundreds from the Netherlands and Denmark. Most of these children later had only hazy memories of the camp, but several remembered “lots of large rooms, with lots of beds”, and a few recalled strange events such as being made to walk around naked in the spring sunshine – a cynical attempt on the part of the camp’s guards to brighten the children’s pale, nutrient-deprived complexions in anticipation of a visit from the Red Cross in June 1944. The first prisoners arrived on 10 May 1945. Sir Benjamin Drage, a philanthropist who owned a chain of furniture stories, donated part of Weir Courtney, his estate in Lingfield, Surrey, for this purpose – and Alice herself volunteered to act as matron. He was guided by a spirit of revenge and tolerated whimsical mistreatment of the prisoners by the guards. The rest, two boys and four girls, stayed with Alice, as did several of the children who arrived in 1946. This article was first published in the January 2020 edition of History Revealed. The Central British Fund rushed to prepare the Windermere reception centre. Save up to 72% and get your first 6 issues for only £9.99! We were in Theresienstadt for three months. Like many adoptive parents of the era, Jackie’s new mother and father did not tell him about his past, and so he learned the truth through a series of shocking, accidental revelations. Dr. Hans Schmoller (10 April 1879 – 2 November 1942) was a German Jew from Berlin. Many later recalled their wonder at arriving at the beautiful, huge house at night to see its many windows shining with candlelight. In July 1945, news reached London that several hundred children had been saved from Theresienstadt and were healthy enough to make the trip to Britain. Ella Baker was born in Vysni Apsa, Czechoslovakia on August 31, 1924 but grew up in Cop, Slovakia. This only entered her mind as she watched the sky for aeroplanes. Unlike the adolescents, the young children brought to Britain from Theresienstadt had been captives in the ghetto-camp for years – indeed, none had any memories of life before the camp. Moniek Goldberg, one of the teenage boys who was brought to Windermere, recalled that Theresienstadt was “a nightmare”. Nevertheless, Jewish people imprisoned in Theresienstadt managed to maintain a degree of normalcy in the camp – and this was particularly true for children. Garrison church in the Main Fortress was designed by Heinrich Hatzinger, Julius D’Andreis and Franz Joseph Fohmann. Montefiore managed to persuade the Home Office to allow 1,000 children under the age of 16 to be brought to Britain for recuperation. It was a transit camp for Czech Jews before they were deported onwards to killing centres and concentration camps in the east; it was a ghetto where people were imprisoned and forced to work; and, in the end, it was a dumping ground for prisoners from other camps as the Nazi empire collapsed. They were not protected from onward deportation, however, and of the 15,000 children who passed through Theresienstadt, an estimated 90 per cent were killed. Postwar efforts to help these children – alongside the estimated 13 million other European children who lost parents in the war – constituted one of the largest humanitarian aid projects in history. Alice Goldberger and her staff at Windermere soon decided that because the young children were so few in number, it would be best for them to be moved into their own dedicated facilities as quickly as possible. What became of these children under Alice Goldberger’s care, these young survivors of the Holocaust for whom Britain was meant to be a temporary way-station en route to somewhere else? I shall never quite forget the impression they made.”. [5], The complex was taken over for operation by the International Red Cross on 2 May 1945, with the Commandant and SS guards fleeing within the next two days. In Theresienstadt, they had been housed in a special facility for infants, separated from their families and cared for by other inmates. In July 1945 the camp shifted under the control of the Czech Ministry for Domestic Affairs. In August the children arrived, carried from the continent in specially adapted British bombers. The high price of metal encouraged the vandalizing thieves. Of the six toddlers, five were adopted relatively soon after joining the older children at Weir Courtney (despite foreign-born children not being legally allowed to be adopted in Britain until the 1950s). She and her mother are the only survivors of their family, 15 members of whom were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau: three of Eva’s grandparents, her father, uncles, aunts and her 7-year-old cousin, Peter. They knew little about what had gone on in Hitler’s concentration camps, but had all seen shocking photos in newspapers and footage in newsreels of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald in April 1945: the corpses of the dead, and the starved and broken bodies of the living, peering out of skull-like faces, witnesses to conditions so horrific they stretched the human imagination. At the end of the war, there were 17,247 survivors of Theresienstadt (including some who had survived the death camps). In 1938, it annexed the Sudetenland. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Some grave markers were recovered.[9]. On 2 October 1942, Hans sent this Red Cross Telegram to his sister in law, Johanna Behrend, who had emigrated to England in 1939. She had years of experience working with psychologically troubled children, but she still worried that the task before her would test her skills to the limit. It was not natural or inevitable that these child survivors of the Holocaust should have come to Britain. Her new book, Orphans of the Storm: Children After the Holocaust, will be published by Yale University Press in 2020. In December 1945, she went to live at Weir Courtney under Alice Goldberger’s care, where she spent the rest of her childhood. According to the Fund, a long-term conservation plan was conceived, which includes further repairs, documentation, and archaeological research. Children were especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust.. “We had as happy a childhood as any normal child,” she recalls. 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