Czech toothpaste found near interim refuge of Holocaust survivor orphans in England
‘Windermere Children’ brought from Prague in 1945 at request of philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, briefly stayed at Lake District village before moving to hostels, permanent homes
A nearly eight-decade-old tube of Czech toothpaste was dug up in England’s Lake District as researchers pursue information on a group of children who stayed in the area after surviving the Holocaust, it was reported Saturday.
About 300 Jewish orphans stayed at Calgarth Estate in Troutbeck Bridge when they were brought over from Prague in 1945.
A team from Staffordshire University is on the hunt for the few personal items that they left behind, according to the BBC report.
Kevin Colls, a genocide archaeologist leading the dig, said that the manufacturing location of the toothpaste connected it to the children.
“It’s interesting as it was made in the former Czech Republic so there’s a link to the ghetto where the children who came here were from,” he said.
“We’re finding a lot of evidence from the site is being lost, so we’ve got documents and archives but we haven’t got the evidence and artifacts from the site,” Colls added.
The findings will go on display at the Lake District Holocaust Project exhibition at the Windermere Library as part of exhibits on the so-called “Windermere Children.”
The children’s journey to Britain was set in motion in June 1945 when the Home Office agreed to a request from philanthropist Leonard Montefiore to grant up to 1,000 displaced children permission to come to the United Kingdom. Montefiore was a founder of the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF, now World Jewish Relief), which had rescued about 65,000 Jews from Nazi Europe prior to World War II.
The Home Office’s agreement had come, however, with the condition that the children would be supported by funding from the refugee organizations and that they would also arrange logistics, such as health screening. An appeal for £1 million (£81 million in today’s money) was launched by the CBF. “IT IS YOUR DUTY,” adverts suggested, to help make the children “happy and healthy” again.
Thanks to the success of the appeal, 732 children aged between 8-16 year-olds (around 80 of them girls) were eventually brought to the UK. Three hundred, who had mostly been liberated from Theresienstadt in May 1945, were designated to travel to the Lake District, arriving in August of that year.
Jack Aizenberg, a teenager who had survived Buchenwald and a 200-mile death march, described their journey as “like going from hell to paradise” in a 2010 BBC documentary.
The children’s spell in the Lake District inevitably had to come to an end and by early 1946 all had departed for hostels and new homes throughout the UK.
Robert Philpot contributed to this report.
