Kaiserwald to Stutthof

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 Kaiserwald 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.

^{Kaiserwald memorial.}

With the Red Army advancing on Riga, Kaiserwald commenced preparations for evacuation in late June and July 1944. Apart from some prisoners who reached Stutthof overland via Libau, most were marched to the port of Riga, where they boarded ships bound for Danzig.

On 6 August 1944, the Bremerhaven departed Riga with 6,382 Jews from the subcamps. Subsequent sea evacuations took place in mid-September 1944 (called the Rosh Hashanah Transport by prisoners) and on 24/25 September (the Yom Kippur Transport). On the latter, the Kanonier carried 3,155 prisoners to Danzig. The Rosh Hashanah transport was sunk by a submarine.

A final 190-strong cleanup detail left Riga on 11 October 1944. Held below decks for three days with few provisions, the inmates suffered from overcrowding and seasickness caused by rough seas. To distribute food and remove excrement from the holds, the kapos, prisoners placed in charge, improvised a bucket and winch system, but the high seas caused food and excrement to spill onto the prisoners below. A few prisoners got fresh air by relaying buckets to the deck. Landing at Danzig, the survivors were marched to the Vistula River, where they boarded 500-person barges for two or three days before entering Stutthof.

Most of Kaiserwald’s survivors were scattered among the Stutthof subcamps. Others were sent to Dachau/Mühldorf, Buchenwald/Magdeburg, and Nevengamme/Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel.