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 Vaihingen subcamp of the Natzweiler-Struthoff 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.
In January 1945 3,000 prisoners were loaded onto a train which was attacked by US fighter planes. The train was derailed and rolled down the embankment. Many of the prisoners were injured and killed. They were then marched during three nights to another railway station, which had just been bombed. The prisoners were forced to sleep in a field and then taken on a death march to another station.
The exact details of the route are not known.
“During the third night we arrived at our immediate destination which was a railway station, but this was ablaze, presumably bombed. Again the guards did not know what to do, and so we spent the rest of the night in a field near the station. We all laid down and slept. Later that night I was woken. It was raining and I had been lying in a pool of water, but this had not woken me, even though I was soaked to the skin. We started marching again, but we had no strength left so we were barely moving … One night whilst we were walking a friend of mine Yitschak Cygelman decided he could walk no further. Two of us had to walk dragging him along between us. Eventually we did manage to get to a train. We were on the train for seven days during which time we had no food nor water at all. By that time there was plenty of room in our carriage as every day we took out the dead and threw them into the last carriage, which was just for the dead.”
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