Members of the Boys were held in Nazi labour and concentration camps and used as slave labourers.
From 1933-1945 Nazi Germany operated over 1,000 concentration camps and subcamps in its own territory and across German occupied Europe. Among them was the Berga an der Elster labour camp, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
As the camps were dissolved thousands of people, among them members of the Boys, endured horrific evacuations from the camps on foot, in freight wagons and open top trains, as well as perilous journeys across the Baltic Sea.
The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.
On 11 April the SS ordered the prisoners to form rows of five and issued them with blankets and bowls. For those members of the Boys who have been on the death marches from Auschwitz – just months before – the agony was now repeated.
About 1,500 men were marched towards Theresienstadt-Leitmeritz, traveling in a southeasterly direction for 160km. On the way they climbed a height of over 1,200 meters in the Erz Mountains. The final climb from Goldenhöhe (Zlatý Kopec in Czechia) to a point somewhere between Schmiedeberg and Oberhals was extremely difficult, as indicated by the number prisoners who died along the way.
In the evening of on 21 April 1945, approximately 850 arrived at their destination during a blizzard. The remainder had either fled or died on route.
“We’ll go day and night, marching day and night. And I was by that time, 14 years old or 15. I was so weak. I was so emaciated. It was terrible. But I wanted to live. I wasn’t going to die.
We’re going south. I remember going through … places like Zwickau, Passau, all the various German cities on the outside. We came to a place not far from the Czech border where the Nazi SS comes out and says, Alle Juden, raus. And they separated the Jews … when the 200 Jews were left over, they put us on a car in the siding, a railway siding, there was one car. They put all the Jews in that one car. And we went south.
We didn’t know where we were going. But as my understanding, the ones who were left over were shot. But us Jews, they put us in a siding, and we’re going south, further south. We don’t know where we’re going. And guess where we wound up? We wound up in Theresienstadt. We came into Theresienstadt. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a ghetto in the city. It was houses and so far. I couldn’t believe it.”
Sam Hilton testament to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1988.
Other groups that did not include members of the Boys may have taken routes through the Erz Mountains via Zwickau and Chemnitz. Small groups also arrived by rail in Theresienstadt and went by in a westerly direction along the crest of the Erz Mountains. About 500 prisoners were taken by train to Dachau.
About
History
Education
Quilts
FIlms
Photos
News Media & Events
Publications
Donate