Flössberg to Mauthausen

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 HASAG labour camp in Flössberg, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

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.

The prisoners were taken by death train to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. For those members of the Boys who have been on the death marches from Auschwitz just months before the agony was now repeated.

The journey took 15 days. The exact route of the train is not known.

The group that included Abraham Warsaw and Artek Poznanski decided that they would escape. After 17 boys had jumped from their wagon. The Germans stopped the train and placed the bodies of some of those who had been shot in the wagon and for the rest of the journey they travelled with a German guard.

^{Artek-Poznanski in 1948.}

“Shot and wounded while trying to escape, I found that the spoon I carried in my trouser pocket had saved my leg and probably my life too. Unable to walk, I crawled to the nearest village where I had the good fortune to come across Czech partisans who saved me by hiding me in a barn while Germans looked from escapers.”

Artek Poznanski, quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Boys: The Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors (Wiendenfeld & Nicholson, 1996).

Many prisoners died while marching up the hill to Mauthausen. Abraham Warsaw, later Alec Ward, testified that on arrival the prisoners were stripped naked and remained unclothed until they were liberated by the US army.