Barely three months after the end of World War 2, hundreds of bewildered Jewish children were flown from what had been the hell of Nazi Europe to the Lake District, an idyllic rural spot in north-west England.
The story of the ‘Windermere Children’ is now well documented but what makes one girl’s experience stand out is that she attempted to keep it secret from her own children in order to protect them.
Indeed, says Vivienne Margolis, it was only after a chance sighting of her mother, Viennese-born Judis Singer’s passport during a family holiday that the truth began to emerge.
Margolis, an Israeli citizen from Manchester working in a senior role at a biotechnology company and herself the mother of five, says she had previously believed that both her parents were native UK citizens.
But after she noticed that Judis’s passport named Vienna as her place of birth, her father felt forced to reveal her mother’s time as ‘Displaced Person Number 228’.
She had been among about 300 Jewish children who, on 14 August 1945, boarded one of a squadron of 10 converted RAF Stirling bombers that flew from Prague in former Czechoslovakia.
The passengers were split into groups of 30 per plane, with 15 sitting on each side on the floor. About eight hours later, they landed near the Lake District at RAF Crosby-on-Eden.
The children were the first intake of the now famous pioneering rehabilitation scheme, in which boys and girls from liberated Nazi labour and concentration camps were given a chance to begin life anew after the horrors of the Holocaust.
After landing, the children were driven to the Calgarth Estate at Troutbeck Bridge, a mile from Windermere.
What was their physical and mental state? How did the adults employed to care for them begin to repair the damage done to individuals, who were often the only survivors of large families? How did they communicate when they spoke no English?
These were among the enormous challenges faced by both sides at Windermere and which were recorded in a recently rediscovered daily journal penned by Austrian-born art therapist, Marie Penath and which has now been published as ** Rock the Cradle.
Meanwhile, Judis Singer was among those from the ‘Windermere’ group to settle in Manchester where she and her future husband, Louis Ingleby helped to establish Bury Hebrew Congregation, and he was elected its first vice president.
Vivienne Margolis has begun to share her mother’s story with Israeli audiences and this past week she addressed a Zoom-streamed Karmiel English Speakers’ Club session marking international Holocaust Memorial Day.
** Rock the Cradle is available in the UK from Waterstones and
Amazon.co.uk or overseas via 2nd Generation Publishing.
© Natalie Wood (29 January 2021)
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