The night terrors came often but Harry Olmer remembers only one of his dreams. ‘I was standing facing my mother. We did not talk to each other, we just looked. There was a brick wall being built between us and it got higher and higher until… until I could no longer see her.’ The image symbolised all that he had lost – his family, his home and his future. When he arrived in the UK, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp and the Czech ghetto of Terezin, Harry had nothing. His papers said he was 15 and an orphan. What happened to him in the weeks that followed would make him a footnote to the history of the Second World War. Seventy-five years later it’s about to make him a TV star.
Kacper Swietek plays Harry (as Chaim, his birth name) in the new TV dramatisation The Windermere Children
Refugee and concentration camp survivor Harry Olmer at the Calgarth camp near Lake Windermere in the late Forties. Right: Harry, now 92, as he is today
Some of the 300 refugee children pose in front of the Calgarth Estate at Lake Windermere in 1946
Harry arrived on an RAF airlift, part of a radical human experiment: the rehabilitation of 300 Jewish refugee children ranging from toddlers to teenagers on the shores of Lake Windermere. Overall, there were 732 child survivors who were rescued and rehabilitated in the UK by The Central British Fund now known as World Jewish Relief, a humanitarian and development charity.
Harry remembers their first meal, when youngsters who’d come close to starving to death grabbed handfuls of bread and fled from the dining room believing they’d never get another slice, even though the larder was stuffed with loaves. He remembers, too, his first night there, sleeping on the bed instead of in it, because he did not know how to get under sheets and blankets.
Harry’s story, interlaced with those of four other boys, is being told in a clever, compelling new BBC2 drama. The redemptive tale of The Windermere Children will be broadcast later this month to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler’s Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Marvel star Thomas Kretschmann plays German-born psychologist Oscar Friedmann, the man in charge of the children’s recovery, while Tim McInnerny is British philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, who brokered the deal with the Home Office. Romola Garai is pioneering art therapist Marie Paneth, while Game Of Thrones actor Iain Glen is sports coach Jock Lawrence, who would later go on see the sportiest of the Windermere boys, Sir Ben Helfgott, captain the British Olympic weightlifting team.
The silent star, though, is the lake itself, its glacial water given a talismanic quality by the film-makers, suggesting baptism and renewal every time the children dive into it.
Harry, now 92 (his papers were inaccurate), was born in Poland in 1927 and taken by the Nazis in 1942. By the time of his Red Army liberation in May 1945, aged 17, he was, in his own words, ‘at death’s door. One extra day and no one would have taken any notice of the boy lying on the bunk, it was that close,’ he says. He remembers landing at an RAF base near Carlisle in August 1945 and being bussed down to the Lakes.
‘The coach driver stopped now and again and we could hear singing and jollification. People were celebrating VJ Day – that’s how we found out the war was really coming to an end. But what brought it home to me was the bread, white bread. It had been so long since I had seen such a thing. We were sitting waiting to eat it, our eyes in our stomachs, longing for a slice.’
The children were housed on the Calgarth Estate, a workers’ village built for the war effort and no longer needed. Harry was allocated a bed and a little cupboard in a room of his own. ‘I wondered what on earth I was supposed to put in it. I had nothing, literally nothing.’
Within days he had settled in to a regime of hiking, biking, swimming and school lessons, learning English and catching up on the work he’d missed as a Nazi prisoner. He and his friends played robust games of football against village children – they had to be told to let opposing teams score the occasional goal – and chatted up local girls. Harry even found the courage to go the cinema in Bowness-on-Windermere. ‘I didn’t speak much English but I went to see The Sign Of The Cross by Cecil B DeMille and I understood it because I already knew the story,’ he chuckles.
A promo shot from the new dramatisation. ‘The bond between us boys,’ says Harry Olmer, ‘was unbreakable’
‘This is how we were healed – we had the chance to become human again. The memories I have of Windermere are indescribable. After the hardship and hunger and disease, all the good things in my life feel as if they started the re.’
It seems bewildering that so little is known about this fascinating story, but it has a lot to do with Montefiore banning the BBC from covering the arrival of the children to ensure their privacy. Without archive footage and with so much else happening that summer as the world rushed towards the official end of the war, the Windermere children became a kind of Cumbrian folk tale. And, like many folk tales, it has darkness as well as light.
The film begins with the voices of survivors speaking of Holocaust experiences with a familiarity that makes them no less terrible. The opening shots are an echo of their past in the concentration camps, boys to the right, girls to the left, relinquishing any meagre possessions, stripping for physical examinations. ‘Sounds familiar,’ hisses one boy to another. ‘This is England,’ comes the reassurance. ‘We are still Jews,’ he snaps back.
They are, of course, just children, petrified, scarred, malnourished and alone. At night their little huts reverberate to the sound of their nightmares, like Harry Olmer’s dream of losing sight of his mother. During the day Friedmann and Paneth risk being overwhelmed by therapeutic work that must be performed on a scale and at a speed never tried before. In one pivotal scene the blunt Jock Lawrence tells his football squad they ‘need to move forward’, because the outside world is hastening on. ‘It’s not so easy when everyone you love lies in the past,’ the boys respond, walking out.
Perhaps the most devastating scene is the moment the Red Cross tracing service arrives and officially delivers the news of the loss of their families. For many it is the end of hope and shows clearly why the children clung to each other as a surrogate family for the rest of their lives. Indeed, Harry’s mum – so vivid in his dreams – was dead.
‘The bond between us boys,’ says Harry Olmer, ‘was unbreakable.’ After his summer at Windermere he was sent to Scotland, where he studied for his Lowers and his Highers (the equivalent of GSCES and A-levels) at night school. ‘I took German and Polish because I thought a foreign language would be useful. I passed German and failed Polish,’ he remembers. He then took a degree in dentistry, qualifying in 1953 after becoming a British citizen and doing his national service. By the time he retired in 2016 he was the oldest practising dentist in Britain. He married Margaret, who’d arrived from Vienna on the Kindertransport, the pre-war evacuation of thousands of European Jewish children to the UK. They settled in Hertfordshire had four children and now have eight grandchildren. Seven years after Windermere, Harry was reunited with the sister he thought was dead, and then the siblings found their brother too.
Reunion is the heartsong of the climactic scene, where one of the boys, who has been told he is unlikely to have any surviving family, sees his elder brother arrive without warning on a motorbike. He had joined the free Poles fighting with the RAF and, extraordinarily, had been stationed just a few miles away at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, when the Red Cross traced his brother to Windermere.
‘That,’ confirms Trevor Avery, director of the Lake District Holocaust Project, ‘is absolutely true.’ The project has been researching the child survivors of Windermere since 2005 and has spent the past three years helping screenwriter Simon Block and all those involved with the Anglo-German production to make the film authentic. As well as speaking to survivors, researchers have also been able to draw on the testimonies of camp workers, such as the cooks who verified the story about the children marvelling at the abundance of bread, and the nursery nurse who cared for the youngest refugees. They have also had access to the unpublished 1946 diaries of Marie Paneth, which are held in the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
‘I always knew there was a play or a film in this,’ says Avery. ‘It is unique – people don’t expect such a story to be set in the Lakes. The Holocaust, 300 children, straight from hell, arriving for a summer in Windermere, where actually you expect Wordsworth.’
The lake itself is the location for the uplifting close of the film. The boys are told to go and earn their places in the world, not to grab what they think has been earned by their suffering. They start to run beneath a grey Cumbrian sky, across the grass to the weathered wooden jetty where the old men, the real survivors, await. The period piece gives way to 2020, the drama to reality. In a few lines each man tells the viewer what he did with his second chance. Even in a year that will be crammed with Second World War commemorations, it’s a standout piece of television.
‘The Windermere Children’ is on BBC2, January 27 at 9pm. It is followed by the documentary ‘The Windermere Children: In Their Own Words’ on BBC4 at 10.30pm