The challenge

Our client, Holocaust survivor charity, the ’45 Aid Society, was set up by a group of what were originally 732 orphaned child survivors (mainly boys but including 80 girls) who had lost all of their families in the horrors of the concentration camps and death marches and, following liberation in August 1945, were subsequently flown from Prague on RAF bombers to start new lives in Britain. They became known as ‘The Boys’ and once settled in the UK, they grew up, married and started families and businesses of their own.
Before they were flown from what they later described as ‘hell to paradise’ in 1945, around 300 of them had a photo taken next to an iconic statue in Prague’s Old Town Square, which is still there to this day.

As 2020 will be the 75th anniversary of the ‘Boys’ liberation and the start of their new lives in the UK, the charity decided to take as many remaining survivors as possible (most now in their 80s and 90s) back to Prague in 2019, together with their children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren, to recreate that same photo which will then be displayed side by side with the original at the charity’s 75th anniversary reunion dinner in 2020.

The results

We were tasked with organising this historic visit, which would take place over a weekend in May 2019 and include a traditional Friday night dinner for the whole group, a concert on the Saturday night and the photo taken on the Sunday morning, followed by an emotional visit to Theresienstadt concentration camp, from which many of the survivors had originally been liberated.

Working closely with the chairman and a small team of volunteers from the charity, we initially thought that maybe 50 or at most 100 people would come on the trip. In the end, 250 people made the journey, although only 7 of the original survivors were able to make the trip.

Managing the needs of all of these people, as well as organising dinner, transport, the concert, the logistics of taking the actual photograph (including securing a host of permissions documents from the local council in Prague) and of organising the return to Theresienstadt, including a memorial service that took place there, proved to be a mammoth task, but not an insurmountable one!

Due to our detailed and extensive planning, covering every tiny aspect to ensure that nothing could go wrong, the weekend ran incredibly smoothly and many people commented afterwards that they had enjoyed it so much and been able to connect with friends and family with whom they had lost touch.

As well as organising the whole weekend, the event attracted a huge amount of media interest, both here in the UK and abroad in Prague as well as in Poland and in Israel. We liaised with all of the media and secured major media coverage across the UK and internationally.