As the future members of the Boys came out of hiding and returned home to find that the overwhelming majority of their family had not survived, they began to gravitate to towns like Bratislava and Kosice in present day Slovakia and the capital Prague, where Jewish committees supported by the UN and the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee were running children’s homes and trying to rebuild Jewish life. These organisations offered food, pocket money, accommodation and help finding employment. A number of the younger children in the third and fifth group of the Boys were taken to the children's home in Kosice (Kassa in Hungarian/Kaschau in German). The city played a significant role in their experiences immediately after the liberation.

Kosice was liberated on 19 January 1945 by Czechoslovak and Soviet forces. Until the liberation of Prague in May 1945, it was the seat of the new Czechoslovak government and all the countries principal organisations. Jewish groups across a broad spectrum of political and religious affiliations also made Kosice their Slovak headquarters.

Until the German invasion of Slovakia in March 1944, Koscie had been a centre where Jewish refugees from Poland were helped by the local community, especially the youth groups, who helped to smuggle Jews into Hungary. Although the Jews of Kosice had suffered terribly under the persecution of the Arrow Cross and the Nazis, Jewish life quickly revived after the liberation and the community united together. They reopened the synagogues and the children's home and set up a soup kitchen and temporary hostel for the homeless and refugees who arrived in the city from Czechoslovak territories further to the east that had been annexed to the Soviet Union. Kosice was an important point where survivors registered their names with Jewish agencies who then sent these lists to the International Red Cross, the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency.

Jewish life centred around the synagogue on Zvonarska street where the children's home was sitatued. An important yeshiva was founded by survivors and its students were photographed by the photographer Roman Visniac in 1947. Agudat Israel was active in Kosice and this was no doubt one of the reasons that Rabbi Schonfeld knew that there were religious orphans in the children's home on Zvornarska Street.

The first Jewish High holidays after the liberation were important stepping stones for the survivors. On Rosh Hashana 1945 in the two synagogues public prayers were held and many people took part in them.  These were emotional moments when children realised that they no longer had they families around them.

Jewish life in Kosice was lively and centred on Zionism, religious learning and commemorating the dead. Memorial tablets dedicated to the Jews of Kosice who were murdered in the Holocaust were placed in the cemetery and in the synagogue in Zvonarska Street. Life did not return to normal as anti-Semitism was still rife in Slovakia. The first anti-Jewish riot to occur in Slovakia after the Holocaust took place in Kosice on 2 May 1945. The new Czechoslovak government were also reluctant to help Jewish survivors who had declared their nationality as Jewish in the pre-war census. As a result the emphasis was on emigration and starting a new life elsewhere.

Erwin Buncel spent time at the hachshara, the Zionist collective, in Kosicie training for a new life in the Palestine Mandate. One of the heads of the collective was his uncle Izidor Neugreshel. Buncel came to the UK with the third group of the Boys.

In 1947 there were 2,542 Jews in Kosice registered at the synagogue but there many more survivors in the city who had not done so. After the foundation of the state of Israel and the communist takeover the Jewish population declined considerably.

Many members of the Boys were prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland but relatively few were liberated there. The '45 Aid Society is currently conducting research into establishing how many of the Boys remained in the camp in when it was liberated.

A significant group of five small children who were amongst some of the youngest child Holocaust survivors brought to the UK under the Central British Fund scheme remained in Auschwitz until the arrival of the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945.

As the Soviet Red Army advanced into Poland the Germans began to evacuate Auschwitz-Birkenau in November 1944. Prisoners were sent into the Reich proper on death marches, which was the name given to the evacuation by the inmates themselves. Many of the members of the Boys who had been held in Auschwitz were evacuated on these death marches.

Despite the fame of Auschwitz today, the news of its liberation struggled to make it onto the front pages of newspapers in January 1945. The liberation of Majdanek the previous summer had been covered in the Soviet press and a trial had quickly followed, but Auschwitz was largely ignored. The Soviets had no interest in highlighting Jewish suffering, so the Red Army's arrival in Auschwitz was treated as an incidental event in the push westwards. A medical team was left behind to help the survivors who were evacuated out of the camp, many to nearby Katowice. Their experiences there are described by Primo Levi in his novel The Truce.

The five young children who later became part of the Boys were taken to Slovakia and made at least some of that journey on foot crossing the border across the wild Tatra Mountains. They were probably in the care of the adult female prisoner who had been in charge of their barracks. This was the case in a similar barracks for boys, where Dr Mengele kept other children to be used for medical experiments. That group were taken by the barrack leader to Budapest after liberation, probably along the same route.

The five children were taken to the orphanage on Zvornarska Street in Kosice. Other children held by Dr Mengele also made this jounrey. The small future members of the Boys told aid workers that they wished to go to Palestine. The five children were, however, then put in a group of children who were to be taken to the UK and moved to the Belgicka orphanage in Prague.

Almost 40 of the Boys spent time in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and were liberated in the main camp or in its networks of sub-camps at Ebensee, Gunskirchen and Gussen.

Mauthausen is situated on a hill, 19km (12 miles) east of Linz. It was one of the first concentration camp complexes to be set up by the Nazis and was the last to be liberated by the Allies. It was located next to a stone quarry where prisoners were put to work as slave labourers.

The majority of the Boys who were prisoners in Mauthausen arrived on death marches from Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1945. The Boys names can be seen on official German documents that list the prisoners that endured the death marches. The originals are on display in the Mauthausen Memorial Museum. The name of Herman Herscovic appears on the list of prisoners who left Auschwitz on 27 November 1944. They walked almost 400 miles to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin before they were forced to walk the same distance to Mauthausen in Austria. As a result of the influx of prisoners, the camp and its sub-camps became dangerously over-crowded and thousands of detainees died of disease and starvation.

Liberation

The US Army liberated the main camp and the sub-camp of Gusen on 5 May 1945. Gunskirchen was liberated on 4 May and Ebensee on 6 May. After the liberation Jewish prisoners in Ebensee sang the Ha Tikvah.

The situation was one of complete chaos. In Ebensee, where a number of the Boys, among them Adolf Fixler, Tama Stern and Mechel Bandel were liberated, prisoners had no food, water and virtually no clothing. UNRAA teams were attached to military divisions of the US Army but were completely taken aback by the scale of the refugee crisis. Unable to cope, it meant that many of the surviving Boys spent weeks in field hospitals and fending for themselves before they were finally offered care and support by the Americans.

Just a few days after the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, an investigating commission of the US Army began to collect evidence in preparation for war crimes trials, which took place in Dachau in 1947. Much of this evidence had been saved from destruction by concentration camp prisoners, despite the risk this posed to their own lives

From May 1945 Austria was occupied by the Allies and under the Allied Commission for Austria, divided similarly to Germany into four zones - American, British, French and Soviet. Mauthausen was in the Soviet sector.

After the liberation thousands of starving prisoners died from malnutrition and disease. Some of the members of the Boys, among them Julius Diamanstein, were taken to hospitals in nearby Wels and Linz. There was little organised assistance and many survivors stole everything they needed and there was little reason to stay in Austria.

Of the Boys who were liberated at Mauthausen some, however, were fortunate to be helped by United Nations aid workers. Abraham Maisner, Bruno Meier and Abraham Warsaw, later Alec Ward, were taken for recuperation to the Kloster Indersdorf children’s home near Dachau. Others spent time in the displaced persons’ camps in the American sector in Wels and Linz, before making their way into the American occupied sector of Germany, where Jewish life had begun to revive in the displaced persons’ camps.

The Return Home

The overwhelming majority of the surviving members of the Boys, however, decided to return home to Czechoslovakia. It was only after they had done so that aid workers on the ground identified a group of about 100 teenage survivors who were offered visas on the Central British Fund scheme to come to the UK. That group turned the visas down and were taken by the Jewish underground into Italy from where they sailed to Haifa on the illegal immigrant ship the Josiah Wedgwood.

Although some survivors, like Wolfgang Adler, returned to Prague after the liberation and then joined the first group of the Boys who came to the UK in August 1945, the majority of the future members of the Boys who were liberated at Mauthausen and its sub-camps would spend almost a year in Czechoslovakia and only finally came to Britain in 1946 as part of the third and fourth groups of the Boys

At least half of the Boys who were liberated in Mauthausen were from the Carpathian Mountains. The homecoming was, for many of them, an unhappy one and for most there were no family members waiting for them. Even worse, many of those who returned home were met with hostility and violence. The Carpathian region was annexed to the Soviet Union in a rigged referendum in July 1945 and the Boys who returned home found themselves dealing with an increasingly hostile Red Army.  The vast majority of the Jews who lived in the Carpathians before the Holocaust were not only very religious, but many were Zionists, and as a result survivors found themselves on a collision course with Stalinism. The Boys then left the region and headed for Bratislava, Kosice and Prague where Jewish relief organisations offered survivors help and protection.

Present-Day

Mauthausen was declared a national memorial site in 1949. The former camp in Ebensee is now a residential district and the mass graves serve as a memorial. A village was built on the site of the former Gusen concentration camp but there is a memorial and small museum. There is also a memorial at the former Gunskirchen camp.

Föhrenwald was one of the largest displaced persons’ camps in Germany and was located in the American occupied sector in Bavaria in southern Germany near the city of Munich. During the Second World War it housed slave labourers who worked at the IG Farben munitions factories. The majority fo the members of the Boys who spent time here came to the UK as part of the second group of the Boys. Edita Schwimmer spent time in Föhrenwald and arrived in the UK as part of the third group. It is possible that other members of the Boys who arrived in 1946 had spent time here.

The camp opened in June 1945 and was run by the United Nations organisation, UNRAA. Just weeks before the members of the Boys left the camp in October 1945, Föhrenwald became an exclusively Jewish DP camp. Most of the time that the Boys spent in the camp it was also home to non-Jewish DPs from Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary and the Baltic States. Although the majority of these DPs had been brought to Germany as forced labourers but some had collaborated with the Nazis.

In the period that members of the Boys were in Föhrenwald, it was the third largest DP camp in southern Germany after Landesberg and Feldafing. It had a population at this time of about 4,000 people many of whom had been transferred there from Landesberg.

Housing conditions in Föhrenwald were better than in other DP camps as the buildings were small centrally heated homes that had been built in 1939.

The revival of Jewish life in Föhrenwald began before it became an exclusively Jewish DP camp but only really got underway after the second group of the Boys had left for the UK. The care of young people centred on education and apprenticeships and there were a number of training farms close to the DP camp.

Föhrenwald was the last DP camp to close, in 1957. It was renamed Waldram and is now a residential area of the city of Wolfratshausen. There is an information centre for visitors.

Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech) is the German name for the former garrison town and fortress some 60km north west of Prague that was used as a ghetto and as a propaganda tool by the Nazis. It holds a unique place in the history of the Holocaust and played a vital part in the story of the Boys.

Many of the Boys were liberated in Theresienstadt by the Soviet Red Army on 8 May 1945. Almost 50 of the Boys had spent a number of years living in the ghetto that had been set up at Theresienstadt. But the majority of the Boys who travelled to the UK were teenagers who had been forcibly taken to Theresienstadt from other camps in the spring of 1945 during the final weeks of the war. Many of the Boys’ close family members died in Theresienstadt and on the death marches to the garrison and are buried in the graveyard.

History

The fortress at Theresienstadt was built in 1780 by Emperor Joseph II to resist a Prussian attack on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It served the Nazis perfectly as a ghetto and transit camp for Czech, German and Austrian Jews. Approximately 150,000 Jews passed through Theresienstadt and nearly 90,000 were deported to almost certain death further east. Roughly 33,000 died in Theresienstadt itself. Around 15,000 children passed through the ghetto and were cared for in a series of children’s homes.

The arrest of 481 Danish Jews, before they could escape to Sweden in October 1943, caused an outcry in Scandinavia. This prompted the Nazis to invite the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt in an attempt to dispel rumours of the concentration camps and extermination camps that had been set up by the Nazis in the eastern occupied territories. In April 1944, Theresienstadt was thus transformed into a model ghetto with playgrounds, libraries and schools. As part of the preparations for the planned deception of the visitors, thousands of prisoners were deported to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt in order to reduce overcrowding before the Red Cross arrived.

There was a second beautification process at Theresienstadt in March 1945 when leading Nazis tried to negotiate a separate peace deal with the Americans.

They hoped to use the surviving prisoners as bargaining chips and, as Allied forces advanced in a pincer movement from east and west, prisoners were moved to the Theresienstadt ghetto.

The First Days of the Liberation

Most of the Boys who were liberated in Theresienstadt arrived on death marches or in open topped railway wagons. According to Simon Klin, one of the Boys, as they walked into the Theresienstadt ghetto, Czech Jews dropped lumps of sugar tied to pieces of string out of the windows to help them.

Many of the new arrivals refused disinfection treatments - the testaments of many of the Boys reveal that they were convinced that the Germans had brought them to Theresienstadt to be gassed. A gas chamber had been built there in February 1945 but was never used. The thousands of seriously ill prisoners who flooded into Theresienstadt brought with them typhus, which spread rapidly.

The Red Cross returned to the ghetto on 6 April 1945 and took control of the camp on 2 May. On the evening of 8 May, Theresienstadt was liberated by the Red Army. Soviet troops assumed responsibility for its prisoners the next day. Prague was liberated on 9 May and a new government immediately dispatched a Czechoslovak medical team to stamp out the epidemic and the camp was quarantined.

Many of the Boys spent the first weeks seriously ill in the makeshift Red Army hospital. Many of the Boys said that if the Soviet soldiers had not arrived, they would have been dead within days.

The Russians gave the survivors twenty-four hours to do whatever they wished. Those Boys who were well enough to do so went into the nearby town of Litomerice to find food.

After liberation, a camp for displaced persons was set up at Belsen-Hohne near to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in northern Germany close to Hanover.

Background to Belsen

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by the 11th Armoured Division of the British Army on 15 April 1945. It was a major news story, and the newsreels shocked the world. Many prisoners had been moved to Belsen from other concentration camps on a series of death marches as the Allies advanced on Germany, among them members of the Boys.

The British soldiers who entered the camp found 60,000 prisoners who were dying of disease and starvation. The conditions were appalling and there was hardly any food or clean drinking water. Half of those who were liberated died in the weeks that followed.

After liberation the British soldiers battled to eradicate a severe outbreak of typhus and the concentration camp was burned to the ground in the weeks that followed. Burying the dead was a priority and was a task assigned to the former SS guards, who had still been in the camp when it was liberated.

From Tank Barracks to Hospital

The survivors were taken to the nearby Wehrmacht barracks at Hohne that had been a panzer training school. Hohne is close to Luneburg Heath, which was and still is used for battle practice. The panzers had trained at Luneburg before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The barracks already housed 15,133 prisoners who had been brought from the Mittlebau-Dora labour camp in the weeks before the liberation. It is likely that this group included some of the Boys.

Urgent medical care was the top priority, and a hospital was set up in the new DP camp. Many of the Boys were cared for in the Children’s Hospital. At first German prisoners who had medical training were used as staff, as were survivors, who worked alongside the British Army Medical Corps and the Red Cross. Ninety-seven medical students were also sent from the UK.

Fifty of the Southampton Boys spent the months after the liberation at the children’s home that was set up in a 12th century convent, Kloster Indersdorf, in Markt Indersdorf in Southern Germany near to Dachau and the city of Munich. The home cared for both Jewish and non-Jewish orphans and was run by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA).

UNRAA teams were attached to military divisions of the US Army but were completely taken aback by the scale of the refugee crisis. Unable to cope, it meant that many of the surviving Boys spent weeks in field hospitals and fending for themselves before they were finally offered care and support by the Americans.

Arrival of the Boys

The Kloster Indersdorf children’s home opened on 7 July 1945, over two months after the liberation of Dachau. It was run by one of the UNRAA units, Team 182.

Many of the Boys who spent time at Kloster Indersdorf had been liberated by the US Army whilst on a death march from the Flossenburg concentration camp to Dachau on 23 April 1945. Some spent time with the units that liberated them as the soldiers tried to help as best they could. Others had lived in abandoned houses and made a living stealing watches and bicycles and selling them on the black market. This group of the Boys arrived in Indersdorf in late August. They were all given hand-knitted white pullovers which they can be seen wearing in photographs taken later in the UK. The UNRAA team noted that they had a fierce loyalty to each other, and the sweaters symbolised their unity as a group, which coalesced around the leadership of Kurt Klappholtz.

Other future members of the Boys like Hans Nuemann, who had been liberated in Theresienstadt, made their way separately to Kloster Indersdorf and in Neumann’s case he had spent some weeks in the Deggendorf DP camp.

Care for the Boys

Every new arrival was examined by the medical team, deloused, and inoculated against typhus, smallpox, typhoid and diphtheria. Not all the Boys were keen to have the vaccinations and Jacob Hecht had to be held down by his friends.

The months that the Boys spent at Kloster Indersdorf were highly significant in their rehabilitation. A large Baroque hall was used as a dining room and meals were taken in groups at individual tables led by an adult, as the children had learn even the simplest table manners.

German was the lingua franca. Schooling was compulsory for children between the age of 5-16 years old but many of the older Boys attended the classes and training sessions. Kurt Klappholtz remembered boycotting two of the classes that were taught by anti-Semitic Polish teachers, who were themselves DPs.

The nuns who soon returned to the convent ran the farm and the laundry, cooked, and cared for the smallest children. The older children were encouraged to help with the housework and caring for the smaller children.

Recreation and sport were also important and there are photographs of the Boys playing ping pong and football.

Team 182 spent time listening to the children’s stories and not only asked about their wartime experiences but their life before the war, which many of the Boys said did much to restore their strength. They were encouraged to express their experiences in art and drama and re-enacted scenes from the camps in a play performed in front of General Eisenhower. Erwin Farkas, who went on to become a psychologist, said that he benefitted from telling his story repeatedly as it allowed him to distance himself from the trauma.

Although some of the Boys rejected their faith, others began to be drawn back to their religious traditions and customs. Manfred Heyman recalled that they celebrated Sukkot in the garden and fasted at Yom Kippur. The sisters at the convent respected the Jewish holidays and at Rosh Hosannah covered the crucifixes with bed sheets.

Travelling Home

All the children knew that if their relatives had survived that would try to make their way back to their homes. Although they were aware of the dangers involved and feared for their safety, Team 182 did not stop the children from going home. Lazar Kleinman went to Prague to see his sister who was ill in hospital but she died just before he arrived.

At first Team 182 thought that the children would be speedily repatriated, but the Boys’ journeys home made it clear that the Jewish children could not or would not return home. Before arriving at Indersdorf, Moshe Birnbaum had been beaten up by the people living in his former family house in the German city of Fulda, when he had arrived home immediately after the liberation.

The Photographs of the Boys

In September 1945, a newsreel team led by the director Hanus Burger arrived in Kloster Indersdorf and the footage he shot clearly shows a number of the Boys.

Then in mid-October 1945, photographs were taken of the children that were published in newspapers across the world in the hope that relatives might be found. They were taken by the well-known American photographer Charles Haacker. A bed sheet hung behind the children provided a neutral background and one of the Boys, Salek Benedict, had the idea of writing each of their names on a piece of wood in chalk so that their names featured clearly in each of their photos. Benedict would later become a successful graphic artist.

Visas for the UK

A list of 50 of the Jewish children who could travel to Britain on the Central British Fund scheme was drawn up, but names came and went on and off this list as relatives were found and the children were diagnosed with tuberculosis. The UNRAA staff falsified some of their dates of birth so they could join the transport to the UK. Finally, on 15 October there was tremendous excitement when the group were given their ID cards permitting them to travel to the UK.

The departure was far from straight forward and the first time the group arrived at Munich Airport they found that the planes were not ready, the second time they were delayed by fog and forced to return to the convent, this time accompanied by the group of Boys from the Feldafing DP camp. The third attempt to leave for the UK was thwarted when one of the trucks coming to collect the children had an accident and it was only on the fourth attempt that they finally boarded the planes. Before they left the Director of Team 182, Lillian Robbins gave each of the children a personal letter asking them to stay in touch, and many of the Boys corresponded with the team over the years that followed.

As they climbed aboard, most of the Boys had bread in their pocket but Martin Hecht had filled his with stones in the hope he could throw them down on to Germany during the flight.

The remaining Jewish children at Indersdorf hoped they would follow in a second transport that never materialised and in the months that followed they became increasingly demoralised until arrangements were made for them to settle either in Palestine or the USA.

Today, there is a small exhibition in the convent at Kloster Indersdorf that tells the children’s story.

Click on a photo to view the images of the associated Boys in a slideshow.

After the Holocaust, 250,000 Jewish survivors spent time in displaced persons’ camps across occupied Germany. Over 60 of the Boys and those who joined the ’45 Aid Society in the UK spent time in the Feldafing Displaced Persons’ Camp, 32km (20 miles) south-west of Munich, which was located in Bavaria in the American occupied zone. As with many displaced persons’ camps, it was in a former Nazi base which had held prisoners of war and housed a Hitler Youth summer camp.

Over 500 of the Boys passed at some point through the doors of the Home for Jewish Orphans on Belgicka Street in the Vinogrady district of Prague and the orphanage played a significant role in the majority of the Boys immediate post-war experiences.

Vinogrady was a centre of Jewish life in Prague and before the Second World War, it was home to the city’s largest synagogue, that was destroyed in a bombing raid. The nearby Belgicka orphanage was originally a home for Jewish orphaned boys and opened in 1898. Girls were cared for at another orphanage not far away. It was always intended to be an orphanage for Jewish children from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Czech and German was spoken in the home so all the boys could make themselves understood.

Wartime

After the Nazi invasion more and more children crowded into the orphanage on Belgicka Street, which was also a hub for the now illegal education of Jewish children. In 1940 the girl’s orphanage moved to Belgicka Street. The Nazis closed the orphanage in 1943 and it was then used by the German security services. During the occupation, 429 children from the orphanage were deported as part of 40 different transports. Only 63 of them returned after the liberation.

It was at the orphanage that the children’s opera Brundibar or The Bumblebee was first performed in German occupied Prague before the mass transportations of the Bohemian and Moravian Jews to the Theresienstadt ghetto.

The score was smuggled into the camp where it was staged in the Magdeburg barracks in September 1943. It was a performance that some of the younger members of the Boys, who spent years in Thereseinstadt, may well have seen. The opera became a symbol of hope in Theresienstadt.

The Violinist

Caring for child Holocaust survivors in large country houses was not a uniquely British idea. A series of children’s homes were set up immediately after the end of the Second World War in castles in Czechoslovakia, south of the capital, Prague. Many of the Boys were to pass through them.

The homes were organised by Premysl Pitter, a Christian humanitarian and pacifist, who in the 1930s had cared for orphaned children in Milic House, which was also an after school club in the working class Zizkov quarter of Prague. Pitter and his life-long companion Swiss born Olga Fierz, continued to help Jewish children after the Nazi occupation despite the dangers. They delivered food parcels to families under the cover of darkness and when the moment of deportation came, they provided families with the supplies they needed for the transportation.

Immediately after the liberation, Pitter was appointed to the Czech National Council and he went straight to the former Theresienstadt ghetto to look for ‘his’ children. He discovered that they were no longer alive but that there were hundreds of other small children and adolescents whose lives were threatened by a typhus epidemic. In order to save the youngest, Pitter organised the removal of all those capable of travelling.

On 15 May 1945, Pitter requisitioned four castles, which had been confiscated from their former German owners, in the Aktion Zamek (zamek means castle in Czech). The castles were in a cluster of villages called Kamenice, Lojovice, Olesovice and Stirin, about 25km (15 miles) south of Prague. It was in Czechoslovakia that the youngest members of the Boys had their first experience of living in large country house hostels.

On 22 May 1945, Pitter brought the first 40 Jewish children to their new home in Olesovice by bus. A supper of white rolls, butter, eggs and sweet semolina was served in the dining room under a white, stuccoed ceiling illuminated by huge chandeliers. The children were frightened that the whole thing was a Nazi trick. Many had been filmed in the Nazi propaganda film made in Theresienstadt. One immediate issue for Pitter and his staff was the noise the children made as they shouted at top of their voices, a habit they had picked up in the noisy overcrowded ghetto.

On 2 June, more children from Theresienstadt arrived at the elegant manor house in Stirin. By July 1945, Pitter was caring for 150 children who had been liberated in the ghetto.

The documents in the Premysl Pitter archives at the Comenius National Pedagogical Museum in Prague, however, show that 37 of the Boys spent time in the castles and that the story of the smallest children who came as part of the first group of the Boys was a story within a story. They had nearly all been born in Austria, Czechoslovakia or Germany. They had spent months or years in the ghetto some arriving as babies.

A total of 32 children of the 37 children that were cared for in the castles flew to Great Britain as part of the first group of the Boys that left Prague in August 1945. They remained in the castles until the moment of their departure. The night before they left there was a special meal cooked over a campfire in fields. The next morning, they were woken at dawn and taken by bus to the Belgicka orphanage in Prague. There they joined the first group of the Boys and were taken to the airport. It is for this reason that the youngest members of the first group do not appear in the iconic picture of the group taken in Pragues’ Old Town Square in August 1945.

Milic House continued to operate and after the war many orphaned Jewish children in Prague found their way to the home and from there they were placed in the castles for recuperation. A further six members of the Boys, who were among Pitter’s children, left for the UK in February 1946, as part of the third group of the Boys. One additional member of the Boys, Abraham Herman, who had been in Stirin castle, came to the UK via Germany in 1947 to join his brother.

A total of 37 members of The Boys were cared for in Pitter's castles. This was less than 10% of Pitter's children. Between May 1945 and May 1947, 810 children were cared for in Pitter’s castles. In Czechoslovakia, however, Pitter was a controversial character, as he cared not only for Jewish children but also for German children orphaned in the brutal expulsion of the country’s German population. It was a move that cost Pitter his seat on the Social Commission.

The manor houses were full of beautiful art works and had large libraries of German books and the children were in close contact with the children in the other castles which were all within walking distance of each other. There were daily lessons, even in Latin, walks across the beautiful countryside meadows and frequent Bible sessions. Despite the emphasis on Christian teaching, correspondence in the archives in Prague shows that Pitter wanted his Jewish children to remain as a group, growing up surrounded by those who had had similar experiences.

The documents show Pitter believed the children would spend only a short time in Britain before being sent to British Mandate Palestine. In the UK Pitter’s wishes were either not known, or simply ignored. After their arrival in the UK, the youngest children were placed under the care of the child psychologist Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, and some were put up for adoption by British or American families. The majority of the other children saved from Theresienstadt by Pitter that did not travel to the UK with The Boys went to Israel and were brought up together on a kibbutz.

After the communist coup, Pitter and Fierz fled Czechoslovakia and his story was written out of the history books. He died in 1976 in Switzerland.