The second group

The second group of the Boys arrived in the UK in late October and early November 1945.

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 children were selected from three different locations: the displaced persons’ camp in Belsen-Hohne in the British occupied zone of Germany as well as the Feldafing and Föhrenwald Displaced Persons’ Camps and the Kloster Indersdorf International DP Children’s Camp in the US zone in Bavaria.

Background

It is widely believed that the Central British Fund could not find 1,000 children to fulfil their quota of permits. The story of the Southampton Boys illustrates one of the reasons that the full quota of children was not brought to the UK.

On the ground in Germany there was no scarcity of child Holocaust survivors. The Central British Fund, however, faced considerable opposition to removing the children for recuperation in the UK.

Jewish survivors in the American and British zones of occupation had, by the summer of 1945, begun to organise themselves into an effective lobby, as there had been a revival of Jewish culture and above all Zionism. The Committee of the Liberated Jews of Bavaria and the Committee of the Liberated Jews of Bergen-Belsen both lobbied for survivors’ rights and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and were opposed to moving the children anywhere but Palestine.

It set them on a collision cause with the British government, which had imposed strict limitations on Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1939 White Paper. After the war the Labour Party promised on the hustings to repeal the White Paper but after their landslide victory refused to do so.

List of associated Boys