Polish Children to Post-War England

1,397 Records

Holocaust · Children · Refugees/DPs · Survivors · Poland

Background

by Peter Landé

While far less known than the pre-war Kindertransports, the 1945 post-war movement of children survivors is in many ways even more dramatic. Following the initiative of several British Jewish leaders, the British Government agreed in August 1945 to fly out children survivors from an airfield near the Terezin / Theresienstadt camp. Some of the children were Theresienstadt survivors, but others had been brought there from Poland and Hungary. Unlike the Kindertransports, there was no age ceiling.

The reality and this database are quite complicated, and, if possible, should be compared to information from other sources, both pre- and post-war. The “children”, often teenagers, often chose to change their names upon arrival, perhaps to make them more English, or simply to drop a previous false name. They also often changed their dates of birth. This reflected the reality in the camps that being somewhat older meant that one was put into forced labor rather than simply murdered.

For further information, see:

The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors, by Martin Gilbert (New York, 1996).
Men of Vision: Anglo-Jewry's Aid to Victims of the Nazi Regime, 1933-1945, by Amy Zahl Gottlieb (London, 1998).
They Found Refuge: An Account of British Jewry's Work for Victims of Nazi Oppression, by Norman Bentwich (London, 1956).

Database

This database includes 1,397 records from a variety of smaller reports. Below is a listing of the specific data sources:

List	Description	# of Records
A	List of Polish children who arrived in Great Britain	510
B	Children who arrived in England with a Polish transport (May 1947) (G.R.R.E.C.)	59
C	List of children who arrived in Great Britain from Theresienstadt (August 1945)	3
D	List of Polish children who arrived in Great Britain (07-Jul-1947)	2
E	List of children brought from Poland (Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council, London N16) (07-Jul-1947)	127
F	List of Polish children who arrived in Great Britain (July 1946)	115
G	Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council, 86, Amhurst Park, London, N.16 (Same list as Source F, but with some additions and now more Anglicized)	107
H	Nominal Roll F18-391/357; Children from Czechoslovakia arrived in Great Britain on 11 Jun 1946	103
I		56

The fields for this database are as follows:

Nationalities:
74% (1,037) of the entries are blank; 266 are listed as Polish, 38 German, 10 Austrian, 7 Czech, 1 Russian, and 2 stateless.

Name — family name, given name

Date of Birth — in format dd-mmm-yyyy

Place of Birth — usually a town name

Nationality — see box at right

Father — given name

Mother — given name, maiden surname

Relative — surname, given name

Relative’s Location — city and/or country

Comments

Data set — Code "A" thru "I", as per the table above

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ruth Diamond and Vivian Kahn, who along with Peter Landé compiled these databases from material in collection 3.1.1.3, folder 190 of the International Tracing Service (ITS).

In addition, thanks to JewishGen Inc. for providing the website and database expertise to make this database accessible. Special thanks to Warren Blatt and Michael Tobias for their continued contributions to Jewish genealogy. Particular thanks to Nolan Altman, coordinator of Holocaust files.

Nolan Altman
May 2015

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