v They were known at “The Boys” — a group of 300 Holocaust survivor children flown out to Britain from Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War.
Most ended up in Israel, but 32 of the youngest, taking the final plane on August 14, 1945, had a different story that has only come to light now, nearly three quarters of a century later.
The operation was organised by the Central British Fund, which had masterminded the pre-war Kindertransports. Most of those flown out were Polish Jewish teenagers who had survived slave labour and arrived in the Theresienstadt ghetto, north of the Czech capital, on death marches.
But Petr Matejcek, who works in the archives of the Comenius National Pedagogical Museum in Prague, says the smallest children were nearly all born in Austria, Czechoslovakia or Germany. A number were also from mixed marriages. They had spent months or years in the ghetto some arriving as babies.
After the liberation, Christian pacifist Premysl Pitter, who had helped Jewish families, was appointed by the new Czechoslovak government to rescue the 100 children who survived in Theresienstadt.
“Their lives were now endangered by a typhus epidemic that had over run the ghetto,” Mr Matejcek explained.
“Pitter requisitioned four manor houses in Kamenice, Lojovice, Olesovice and Stirin south of Prague, which had been confiscated from their former German owners.
“The first group arrived in Olesovic on 22 May.”
A supper of white rolls, butter, eggs and sweet semolina was served in the dining room under a white, stuccoed ceiling illuminated by huge chandeliers. The children were frightened it was a Nazi trick. Many had been filmed in the Nazi propaganda film made in Theresienstadt.
Between 1945 and 1947, Pitter cared for 810 children, among them German children orphaned in the brutal expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s German population. After the communist coup, Pitter fled Czechoslovakia and his story written out of the history books.
In addition to those children who left for the UK in 1945, a further seven later joined them in Britain. The older children say the manor houses were like castles, filled with art works and libraries of German books. The house at Stirin is now a hotel and golf resort.
There were daily lessons, even in Latin, walks across the beautiful countryside meadows and frequent Bible sessions. Yet correspondence in the archives in Prague shows that Pitter wanted his Jewish and half-Jewish children to remain as a group, growing up surrounded by those who had had similar experiences.
Documents show Pitter believed the children would spend only a short time in Britain before being sent to British Mandate Palestine. Yet Pitter’s wishes were either not known, or simply ignored.: the children were placed under the care of the child psychologist Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, and put up for adoption by British or American families.
One of the children, Jackie Young, a former London taxi driver, had no idea he was Holocaust survivor until he was nineteen. In order to get married in a synagogue his mother had to show officials documents proving he was Jewish. He snatched them out the secretary’s hand.
“I knew I was adopted,” says Young. “My adopted parents lavished on me whatever I wanted but if I wanted to know about my past it was like a bigger wall than the Berlin Wall.” Now in his late 70s, Mr Young has spent the rest of his life discovering his roots.
Eleven children from mixed marriages were handed over to the care of the Quakers and placed in Butcombe Court, a school run by German political refugees, near Bristol.
Jakub and Samuel Berlowicz were separated from their sister Asta. When their mother was later found alive she wrote to the Central British Fund angrily demanding that they be moved to a Jewish hostel.
The majority of the children Pitter saved from Theresienstadt went to Israel. Only one of Pitter’s children brought to the UK is known to have finally settled there too: Wolfgang Adler, later Sinaj Adler, became a rabbi in Ashdod.