The Windermere Children

The moving true story of a group of Jewish children who, after surviving the Holocaust, were given the chance to start anew amidst the natural beauty of England’s Lake District.

In August 1945, three hundred Jewish children traveled from a former concentration camp in Czechoslovakia to Lake Windermere in the English countryside. They were lucky enough to be offered a place in a fledgling recovery and rehabilitation program for orphans who had survived the ghettos and extermination camps of Eastern Europe under the Nazis.

These children had endured extreme deprivation, starvation, and loss beyond measure, but this was an opportunity for them to start anew, with the support of a team of pioneering teachers and psychologists, surrounded by the natural beauty of England’s Lake District. It was an ambitious plan, led by human compassion. Innovations at Windermere during this pivotal summer led to groundbreaking strides in the field of child psychology, especially in the area of trauma and recovery, for which there was scarcely a language at that time.

Telling the story of that summer at Windermere and the lives of the children who found their way there, this inspiring book reveals and celebrates a little-known episode in post-WWII history. It is not a chronicle of the Holocaust, nor of suffering and loss. Rather, it is the story of a remarkable experiment in healing and human compassion: of ordinary people bending themselves to do good, even against enormous odds.