1,5 MILLION BUTTONS
symbol of memory of the murdered children
In 1945, when the concentration camps were liberated, the British government said they would give a new home to 1000 child Holocaust Survivors who had been liberated and discovered in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic.
Many of these children were found to have passed through Auschwitz Birkenau at some point in their dreadful time during the Holocaust, and had been transported to Theresienstadt towards the end of the war.
Sadly, only 732 could be found alive in Theresienstadt, and who qualified to be taken to Britain. The qualification had been that they had to have survived the concentration camp system and many of these had survived time in Auschwitz, Majdenek, Buchenwald, and many other notorious and lesser known camps. Each had their own tragedy attached to their young lives.
Most of the children who came to Britain were teenage boys along with a smaller percentage of girls, and even some very small children aged between three and six years old. For most of them, their time had been spent as slave labourers in numerous camps for the previous few years. The very much younger children arrived without parents or relatives and their infant lives remain something of a mystery of survival.
Of the 732 who were to come to Britain, the first 300 were flown to Windermere, in the Lake District of England, to be housed on the Calgarth Estate. During the war, the estate had been built to house workers at the nearby Sunderland flying boat factory, on the shores of the lake. When the end of the war came, these workers moved on, and the estate became the start of a new life for the 300 children. The Lakes School is on the site of the former Calgarth Estate, and so the story has a particular resonance with us.
Following Arek’s visit last June, Arek himself being a teenage survivor of Auschwitz, students were asked to reflect on how the Holocaust should be remembered. Some sketched a memorial design, others wrote poetry, and some simply discussed their reactions to what they had heard. One student asked me what 6 million looks like, following Arek’s sharing of the number of Jewish victims of the Shoah. This was a question I simply could not answer. I, as an adult, have no way to conceptualise such quantities, and so, I reasoned, neither do our students. This led to a discussion about what we as a school, could collect in such quantities to act both as a learning tool but also as a permanent memorial to the victims. As the school has a particular connection to the children of the Holocaust, it was decided that we would collect 1.5 million buttons to create a memorial. Buttons were chosen by Student B, as she said ‘they are all different, all individuals, just like people.’
All pictures in this article: The Lakes School
B’s buttons is a project that began in a small secondary school in the English Lake District. Each year, the school welcomes Holocaust survivor Arek Hersh to share his experiences with our students. These visits are particularly meaningful when we consider the history of the Lakes School, and it was after one of these visits that the project came to life.
Laura Oram, the Lake School