The ’45 Aid Society is active in Holocaust Education.
The ’45 Aid Society represents the teenage and child-Holocaust survivors and their descendants who were brought to the UK after World War II for rest and rehabilitation. The group is known as ‘the Boys’ despite the fact that it included over 200 girls.
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.
The ’45 Aid Society works with educational establishments and a wide variety of institutions. We provide lesson plans based on the story of the Boys and provide speakers.
Our Educational Principals
The ’45 Aid Society aims to teach the lessons of the Holocaust through the lived experience of The Boys, a unique group of Holocaust survivors. Our approach uses their individual stories and personal experiences, human connection and ethical reflection, and offers enquiry-based learning with access to a fascinating set of authentic archival material.
Our approach is:
Human centred: The ’45 Aid Society is a unique organisation made up of a community of Boys and their families. Its programme focuses on lived experience/real-life stories through the testimonies of the Boys and Girls who were brought to Britain for recuperation and recovery after the Holocaust. The Boys’ lived experiences in the hostels in the UK and in the communities where they built a new life connects local and global history making it community driven.
Inclusive: The ’45 Aid Society believes Holocaust education with the right support of teachers can be accessible to all.
Historically Rigorous: The ’45 Aid Society focuses on the Boys’ lives in their entirety across multiple phases from childhood and family life, through incarceration, persecution, liberation, recovery and the building of a new life as a refugee. The ’45 Aid Society’s abundance of primary sources: photographs, audio testimonies and original wartime documents offer context and chronology providing the scaffold for learning about the Holocaust in their pre-war countries of origin: Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Romania.
Enquiry Based: Our stress is on dialogic teaching, literacy and oracy. The material available in our digital archive encourages students to investigate, reflect and discuss as young historians, an effective form of Holocaust education in UK and international curricula.
Emotionally Aware: As their families, our personal connection to the survivors and their stories emphasises emotional awareness, sensitivity and care. The ’45 Aid Society celebrates the legacy of the Boys experiences as they live on in the second, third and fourth generations making the Holocaust relevant in the modern context and encouraging ethical reflection.
Our aim is to raise awareness and understanding of the Holocaust through education by telling the Boys stories, commemorating their families and the communities in which they lived. Many of us grew up unaware of our parents’ experiences and feeling the lack of an extended family. Our parents and grandparents passed on to us the responsibility of guarding their testimony.
We are here to:
We support all those developing educational material for schools and other institutions. If you would like to use the Boys’ story as an educational tool, please get in touch for authorisation.
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