The Windermere Children
Lake District Holocaust Project
“We flew to the Lake District where my grandfather convalesced in Windermere with a bunch of other Jewish children. It is the most amazing story about what British communities can do for foreign refugees and the gift they gave.”
Robert Rinder, Who Do You Think You Are, BBC One, whose grandfather was one of those Jewish children.
In 1945 the people of Lakeland welcomed three hundred child Holocaust Survivors into their community. The children were to spend a period of recuperation in the Lakes before setting out on new lives. Arriving in the Lake District was described by the children as like being in “Paradise” as featured in the 2020 BBC and Warner Bros film and accompanying documentary titled “The Windermere Children”.
They were to stay for a number of months on Calgarth Estate, originally a wartime village built for workers at a nearby Flying Boat factory around a mile from Windermere.
The site is now the location for Lakes School.
Their arrival in the Lake District must have seemed like Paradise following years of unimaginable horror in the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Occupied Europe.
The Lake District Holocaust Project was established in 2013 after eight years of intense research activity, Holocaust education work, oral history interviews, travels to Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Holland, France and throughout the UK.
A touring exhibition of photographs and multi-media installations, “Auschwitz to Ambleside”, with an accompanying interactive tour by Holocaust survivors, visited Extended Services school clusters and communities in the Lakes area and South Lakeland during 2008 to 2009.
Following a BBC One television programme in 2010 titled “The Orphans Who Survived The Concentration Camps”, a small permanent exhibition was located in Windermere Library.
Such was the success of this relatively small exhibition that the space was enlarged and improved in 2013 to accommodate a larger display and a separate exhibition space for temporary exhibitions.
Visitors from around the world now visit the exhibition and include travellers from US, Canada, Germany, Holland, Spain, Israel, India, Taiwan, Pakistan and China. At the last count the exhibition had received visitors from throughout the UK and over thirty countries of the world.
Artists, writers, musicians as well as academics, teachers and schoolchildren are involved in this unique and inspiring story that tells the story of the children and also the story of the community who welcomed them.
It is a story without end, something that we are keenly aware of when we receive and welcome visitors, especially those who are children and grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors
