Eva Cohn

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.

Eva Cohn, later Eva Glicksman, came to England from Berlin on a Kindertransport in 1939, aged 15.

After a period in domestic service, she worked as a ladies’ tailor. Later, Cohn worked in a factory as a machine tool fitter – a job she greatly enjoyed. With the end of the war, she was forced to leave ‘so that returning soldiers could get their jobs back’ and ‘your German accent will not go down well with them’.

Cohn then heard through a contact at Habonim about the child Holocaust survivors coming to the UK. She was offered a residential placement at the Loughton Hostel by the Jewish Refugee Committee, who ran the hostel. Cohn spent a year at Loughton.

In later life, Cohn became a teacher. In retirement, she was an active member of the Kindertransport Group and the Association of Jewish Refugees. She gave talks in schools about her experience on behalf of the Holocaust Education Trust.

“Most of The Boys were lovely,” She later recalled. “I remember Ben Helfgott, Harry Spiro, Israel Licht (who was tall, lanky and cheerful). There were two boys called Fuks – it was unusual to have siblings. They went to America. The older one of them became a ‘macher’ (leader) in the Trade Union garment movement.”