"Of course, you know, this is where the children from Auschwitz came".
Anon. May 2005
The work of Lake District Holocaust Project began in 2005 and continues to the present day. A permanent exhibition in Windermere is the window into an archive that contains around one hundred and fifty interviews, thousands of photographs, films, documents, unique objects and artefacts (and material from four years of archaeology at the former site of Calgarth Estate), that cover the entire story of the Jewish child Holocaust survivors who came to the Lakes in 1945 directly from the camps, and the story of the local community that welcomed them.
The story begins locally in 1909 with the Pioneer exploits of hydro aviation on the waters of Windermere and continues to the present day in a local community that can trace its roots to that time. The arrival of the Jewish children is inextricably connected to the landscape and the community. These words by Jack Aizenberg describe it far better than I ever could:
"We came from Hell to Paradise"
So where did it all begin, and how?
It all began in May 2005 with a chance comment from a visitor to an exhibition titled "In Defiance of Gravity" that was held in the market town of Kendal to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War Two.
"Of course, you know, this is where the children from Auschwitz came".
Of course, I did not know and set out to discover the story behind this astonishing and utterly unexpected comment from a visitor to an exhibition organised in the remote region and iconic land of Wordsworth. Ruskin and Beatrix Potter. I still pause for thought when I think back to that visitor today and often wonder if he realised what he had set in motion, and his name will more than probably never be known now.
To bring together the beauty of the Lakes, one of the defining paradigms of Englishness, with the horrors of the Holocaust seemed too incredible to comprehend and although the story has even featured on screen as an award-winning film "The Windermere Children" the sense of wonderment about this coming together has never wavered.
As Professor Tony Kushner of the Parkes Institute in Southampton University once declared:
"It is the coming together of two epics. The epic sweep of Romanticism collides with the epic tragedy of the Holocaust".
I curated the original exhibition as part of the national "Their Past Your Future" initiative that was established for the whole country to mark a significant milestone anniversary. The focus for the exhibition in Kendal was the remarkable story of the Short Bros flying boat factory that was built on the shores of the lake at Windermere, which was said to be one of the largest single span buildings in Britain at the time.
Such an industrial intrusion at the heart of Wordsworth's Lake District seemed to be incredible enough but what was to follow over the coming years was no less amazing.
A housing scheme called Calgarth Estate was built nearby to accommodate the skilled workforce that had to be brought from Rochester to build the flying boats and included two hundred homes and hostel accommodation for three hundred workers who had come unaccompanied and without families. Known as the 'single worker hostels", these were to play host to a remarkable group of Jewish children who arrived here in August 1945.