https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/the-windermere-children-safe-at-last-joe-dolce/
The Montefiore Home in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda is a Jewish residential aged-care facility that opened in 1897, and was named after Sir Moses Montefiore, 1st Baronet (1784–1885), a philanthropist, British banker and Sheriff of London.
Montefiore was from an Italian-Jewish family and had no children of his own, but his long and active life got him a mention in the letters of George Eliot, the diaries of Charles Dickens and James Joyce’s Ulysses. His great-grandnephew Leonard G. Montefiore (1886–1961) was the founding member of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief, and the driving force behind the Windermere Children Project, a scheme in 1945 to allow young Jewish concentration camp survivors into Britain.
Montefiore had previously helped to bring 10,000 Jewish children to the UK before the Second World War, in a scheme known as the Kindertransport. But Britain was now in an economic crisis and practically bankrupt from six years of war, and assisting foreign refugees was not a priority.
Through persistent letter-writing and lobbying, he secured an agreement with the Home Office to allow 300 children to be air-lifted on two RAF Stirling bombers from the liberated concentration
camp and ghetto of Theresienstadt in northern Czechoslovakia (right). They would be housed in a former seaplane factory, closed at the end of the war, known as Calgarth Estate, on the banks of Lake Windermere in England’s Lake District. The workers’ barracks-style accommodation of the factory would allow each child to have their own room. A team of counsellors, led by German-Jewish psychoanalyst Oscar Friedmann, was tasked with the social experiment of rehabilitating the traumatised children in four months. The Home Office stipulated that Montefiore had to arrange the finance to support the project. He appealed to Britain’s Jewish community and donations started arriving from rich and poor.
This inspiring true story is dramatised in a movie, The Windermere Children (2020), directed by Michael Samuels, co-written by Samuels and Simon Block, and produced for BBC and ZDF.