Jay was born Minia Munter in Warta in Poland in 1925.
Jay was a member of a group of Holocaust survivors known as the Boys, despite the fact the group consisted of over 200 girls.
The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after World War II for rest and rehabilitation.
Members of the Boys were held in Nazi labour and concentration camps and used as slave labourers. They had also survived World War II in hiding or as lone children.
Jay’s parents Jacob and Frieda were religious landowners. She was the youngest of eight children: Freidel, Hela, Zalman, Leah, Welwel, Frymet and Hadasa. Her older siblings were married. Her brother Welwel was shot in 1939.
“My family lived in Warta for several generations. My ancestors were always landowners/farmland, as were my family. We owned horses, cows etc.
My family were very well known and respected in the small town where we lived and the surrounding villages. My uncle was on the council representing the town at important meetings and he was the richest Jew in the town. My family were religious. I was the youngest of five sisters and two brothers. My uncle and aunt and their families lived with us in a house, which was divided into three sections, which belonged to my grandparents. Everyone in our town were so close, we all knew each other, just like one big family.”
Minia Jay written testament 1995.
Slave Labour
In 1942, she was taken to Łódź Ghetto with one of her sisters.
In 1944, when the ghetto was liquidated, she was deported to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. She was transferred to the Oederan labour camp in Germany.
Jay was finally liberated by the Red Army in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in May 1945 after enduring a death train. After the liberation, she was in the hospital suffering from tuberculosis but was helped by a doctor who gave her false papers to get her on the children’s transport to the UK.
Minia Jay’s Journey 1939-1948
Pre-war life: Warta, Poland. Forced Journey: → Łódź Ghetto → Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp → Oederan concentration camp → Death train to Theresienstadt Ghetto. After liberation: → Prague, Czechoslovakia → Joins 1st Group of the Boys → Windermere reception centre, UK → Ashford Sanatorium, Kent, UK → Kings Langley, UK.
Life in the UK
Jay came to the UK as part of the first group of the Boys in August 1945 and was cared for in the Windermere reception centre. Ill with tuberculosis she was in the Ashford Sanatorium for almost a year and then in the hostel in King’s Langley in Hertfordshire. She became a corset maker.
Only her sister Hela survived. Jay never discovered what had happened to the rest of her family, but it is assumed that they died in the Holocaust.
Jay married twice and had two children. She lived in Milan and then in London until her death in 2016.
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