Esther Cailingold

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.

Cailingold was born in London in 1925.

When the war ended in Europe, she and her brother danced in Trafalgar Square in celebration. They then spent the summer of 1945 watching newsreel images of emaciated Holocaust survivors.

When Bachad asked for volunteers to go to Germany to work with survivors in the displaced persons’ camps, Cailingold was determined to join them. Her father, however, refused to let her go.

In August 1945, she left home without telling her family where she was going, and went to Windermere reception centre. When the first group of the Boys survivors arrived at an airport near Carlisle, Cailingold was waiting to meet them.

In September, she returned to teacher training school. Then in June 1946, as she took her final exams, she started working with young survivors at the Jewish Shelter, who made up the fourth group of the Boys. Nevertheless, she graduated with First Class honours from Goldsmiths University.

She then worked at Thaxted Farm, one of the Bachad training farms.

Cailingold was a friend of Ida Gross, who was also in Windermere and they often spent the weekend together in Thaxted.

In the summer of 1946, Calingold took a job as an English teacher at the Evelina de Rothschild School in Jerusalem. There she joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground, and became a sniper.

Cailingold was killed in the battle for the Old City in Jerusalem on 29 May 1948, when she was just 22 years old.