(In memory of Our Dear Friends of the ‘45 Aid Society who have passed away)

Introduction

Fewer than 100,000 Jews survived the death camps, slave camps and death marches of Hitler's Reich. This web site is about 732 of those survivors; most of them boys, about eighty of them girls. What these particular 732 have in common, apart from their wartime experiences, is the journey they made together, after liberation, from Europe to Britain. They travelled under the auspices of the Central British Fund, a Jewish organisation which had been active in helping refugees since the rise of Hitler in 1933.

The first group of the 732 youngsters were flown from Prague to Carlisle in August 1945, the second from Munich to Southampton. A third group was flown some months later from Prague to various places in Britain. Later, all three groups were sent to residential hostels throughout Britain.

Most of those who were brought to Britain under this scheme were in their middle to late teens. All but a dozen of them had lost their parents, as well as brothers and sisters, murdered between 1939 and 1945, usually in circumstances of the utmost savagery. Almost all the youngsters had been trapped by the war from the very first days of the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Today they are banded together under the auspices of their own charitable organisation, the '45 Aid Society, named after the year in which the first of them came to Britain.

This introduction is reproduced from 'The Boys' by kind permission of Sir Martin Gilbert.

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