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 Hirschberg subcamp of the Gross Rosen concentration camp.
As the camps were evacuated 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.
When Hirschberg was evacuated on 17 February 1945 as the Red Army approached. The prisoners wearing insufficient clothing were forced to walk for three days to Liberec where they were put on trains and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp.
Both the camp and the town of Liberec were then in the Sudetenland that had been occupied by the Third Reich in 1938.
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