The Windermere girl on the day British soldiers rescued her from Belsen

On Monday evening I attended a special reunion, to mark 77 years since the ‘Boys’ of Windermere – a group of Holocaust survivors – were brought to the UK to start a new life in the Lake District . We were surrounded by our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. If it hadn’t been for the British aid program, none of us would have been here.

This group has always been known as ‘The Boys’ (even though around 10% of us – 80 out of 732 – were girls) and the story was told in the 2020 BBC drama The Windermere Children. My brother, Sir Ben Helfgott, who went on to represent Britain at the Olympics, was one of the main ‘characters’. I’m 91, and there aren’t that many of us now. Only five of us attended the meeting this week.

All these years, we survivors were known as ‘The Boys’, especially after The book of the same name by Martin Gilbert came out in 2002. I didn’t mind, as a woman, being known as one of the ‘Boys’, but others objected. Some of the girls emigrated to Israel and America; others are here, happily married.

Anyway, the name stuck.

Why did so few girls survive? Well, the Nazis didn’t see us as workers, so they had no reason to keep us. For the rest of us, it was more luck than judgment, really.

Once I lied about my age – I said I was 16 instead of 14 – which gave me more luck. I had also taken an incredible risk in 1943, during the liquidation of our ghetto. We were in a column waiting to get into a truck when I asked the SS officer if I could go back to my father and my brother. To my surprise, he said “yes”. I don’t know where I found the courage; I could easily have been shot on the spot.

For many years I did not talk about my experiences in the Holocaust and most survivors did. Much later it became clear to me that England too was recovering and people were rebuilding their own lives. I was born in Poland in 1930, in Piotrokow Trybunalski, a city steeped in history. From the age of nine until the end of the war in 1945, I suffered the most unimaginable horrors, including seeing my mother and sister, among over 500 others, rounded up – they were then shot in the forest of Racow. I survived this only because when we were raided I was in bed, and my mother told the Jewish policeman in charge that I was sick, and he let me stay. It saved my life.

Later, I survived endless calls in Ravensbruck as people died around me. The winters were freezing and the rations consisted of a slice of black bread and a thin watery soup; if we were lucky, one of the women would smuggle in a potato, a turnip, or a radish.

Eventually I was sent to Bergen-Belsen. I was in camp at the same time as Anne Frank, although she was a year older, and unfortunately she didn’t live to see the release. The very first Britons I met were soldiers. It was April 1945, I was 14 and recovering from typhus. Lying on my top bunk by the window, and fainting, I opened my eyes to see people running outside. I didn’t know where they were running, or why – but mostly I wondered how they had the strength to run.