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 Reise labour camp complex, a subcamp of Gross Rosen concentration camp.
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.
Riese was a construction project built from 1943 to 1945 at Niederschlesien (present-day Dolny Śląsk in Lower Silesia, Poland).
The subcamp, Arbeitslager Riese, was part of the complex of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and was formed to provide manpower for the Riese project.
The Reise complex was evacuated on and the prisoners forced on a death march to Gleiwitz, a subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex located in modrn-day Oświęcim.
“Hundreds – I don’t know how many of us died in the winter with no food. At one point I remember we made a stop and we were given horse meat. That is the one thing I remember, cooked obviously … I don’t know how long we were there but I remember leaving there two gigantic heaps of mass corpses that we just accumulated and left them there … that march continued and continued until we somehow. I don’t know how it was but we reached a train again. And this time, this was open wagons, not like the ones we came in the cattle wagons. And it was bitter with sleet, and rain and snow and finally we arrived to Bergen-Belsen.”
The prisoners among them members of the Boys were then loaded onto open-topped trains and taken to Bergen-Belsen, Flossenbürg and Sachsenhausen-Oranianberg concentration camps in Germany.
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