Sommerda to Unknown Destination

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 Sommerda 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.

Rheinmetall-Borsig AG, one of the leading armaments companies, operated one of its factories in Sömmerda, Thuringia. During the war years, the factory produced not only typewriters and calculating machines, but primarily armaments such as detonators, machine guns, and ammunition.

On 19 September 1944, the SS brought a group of 1,216 female prisoners to Sömmerda – Jewish women from Hungary and the adjacent regions then belonging to Hungary, particularly from the area around Sighet in present-day Romania.

The SS evacuated the camp on 4 April 1945, sending its 1,300 prisoners and SS overseers on a death march.

For Fanny Zelmanovic who have been on the death marches from Auschwitz just months before the agony was now repeated.

One part of the death march was liberated by the US army on 13 April near Glauchau in Saxony after they escaped from the march. The remaining prisoners were liberated by Soviet troops on 9 May 1945 near Eger, now Cheb in Czech Republic.

It is believed that Zelmanovic was on the latter part of the march.