Kitchener camp website meeting

Today we held the first steering committee meeting to discuss and plan this new Kitchener camp website project.

We’re excited to be working on this new venture together, and are receiving considerable support and advice from the Wiener Library – which is very much appreciated.

The meeting was held next door to Woburn House, which was the HQ of the German Jewish Aid Committee in Britain – a key organisation helping to get Jews out of Germany in the 1930s. As need grew, the main operation moved to Bloomsbury House in February 1939, but Woburn House continued to be a base for the Central British Fund (also German Jewish Aid) in the postwar years.

This marvellously appropriate location added to our sense that this work is an important part of our long, shared history.

We have a huge amount to get through and will be calling on all kinds of people over the next few weeks to help us get underway quickly.

If you would be happy to help with some of the organisational side of things, please do get in touch. Not least, we need to get the word out as widely and as quickly as possible, so that we have the best chance of reaching the families of the almost 4,000 men who were in Kitchener camp in 1939.

And if you have any of the items we are seeking to upload, please do start to look them out, and perhaps consider getting scans made of your Kitchener photographs, letters, and documents. A good high resolution scan would be great.

We are also interested in high quality photographs of items your fathers and grandfathers might have brought with them from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and in the stories and memories they might have shared about their first year in England.

In the meantime, as further information becomes available, I’ll post it up here.