Lossau was a member of a group of Holocaust survivors known as the Boys, despite the fact the group consisted of over 200 girls.
The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after World War II for rest and rehabilitation.
Members of the Boys were held in Nazi labour and concentration camps and used as slave labourers. They had also survived World War II in hiding or as lone children.
The locksmith Gustav Lossau married Edith Eva Spicker, who was Jewish.
Together with their five children, the family were living at Plantage 22 in Königsberg when the war broke out.
By the 20th century Königsberg had one of the larger Jewish communities within the German Reich. After 1939, emigration was banned, trapping the remaining Jews.
Wartime
Edith Eva Spicker was deported to Auschwitz in 1943, where she was murdered.
She was one of five siblings, who were sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto after their mother’s arrest.
Lossau was liberated in Theresienstadt by the Red Army in May 1945.
A New Life
Lossau came to the UK as part of the first group of the Boys and was cared for in the Windermere reception centre.
She was later in the Herne Hill hostel.
Lossau became a dressmaker and made clothes for celebrities. She married in London in 1953 and had a son. The family settled in the USA.
Lossau died in 2000.
Renate Lossau’s Journey 1939-1948
Pre-war Life: Königsberg, Germany. Forced Journey: → Theresienstadt Ghetto → Liberation at Theresienstadt. After liberation: → Prague, Czechoslovakia → Joins 1st Group of the Boys → Windermere reception centre, UK → London, UK.
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