The Duchess of Cambridge personally requested to meet survivors of the Holocaust who found refuge in the Lake District, after reading the remarkable story of the Windermere Children.
The Duchess hailed the “forward-thinking” treatment of survivors, who were about to find solace in nature in Cumbria as teenage refugees, receiving art therapy, speaking to psychologists and being encouraged to take up outdoor pursuits.
The Duchess asked to meet survivors after reading about the Windermere Children, 300 Jewish children who were flown to the UK in 1945 to rebuild their lives after the trauma of Nazi concentration camps.
They had been liberated from the Theresienstadt concentration camp, having survived years of hard labour, the death of their families, and the final marches in which so many lost their lives.
The Duchess later saw a film of the same name, with a source saying she had been struck by the testimonies of how early support after the extreme trauma of the Holocaust had helped young people begin healing and go on to lead successful lives.
During a visit to Cumbria on Tuesday, she took a boat trip on Lake Windermere with Arek Hersh and Ike Alterman, two of those who settled in Britain.
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During their six months at the Calgarth Estate, on the shores of Lake Windermere, they underwent then-revolutionary sessions with a psychiatrist, took part in art therapy and outdoor pursuits such as hiking, climbing and swimming.
“It was so forward-thinking for the time,” the Duchess declared of the therapy after meeting the survivors and relatives and listening to their stories. “It’s so relevant still today.”
She is understood to have been curious to learn if their resilience in overcoming the horrors they had witnessed and the therapy they received offered lessons for her own work with disadvantaged children across Britain.
