Sister Maria

The Central British Fund (CBF) put together a large team of people to look after the Boys.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The British government offered 1,000 visas to bring the Boys to the UK but the caveat was that the CBF were responsible for their care and would pay all the expenses.

Sister Maria was born in Berlin in 1903.

She moved to the UK and worked in the Ashford Sanatorium and in Quare Mead, which was a convalescence home for Boys with tuberculosis. At least 40 of the Boys had contracted the disease.

Sister Maria had very close ties to the Boys in the sanitorium, often acting as a maternal figure to the many who had lost their parents, and was said to ‘rule with a firm but warm hand’.

Sister Maria married the father of one of the Boys and settled in the USA.