UNRRA White Boat Mission - Kinderheim children leaving Sweden for relatives in United States

 

When looking through the archives, I am always afraid to see the cross sign + on the Medical. and or other registration cards belonging to the Holocaust survivors that came to Sweden at the end of WWII. In some cases, however, the sign was just to show that the patients, former inmates of the concentration camps were belonging to the "Red cross group".

Above are two entry cards of mother and daughter that were brought to Sweden by UNRRAs White Boats. Kinderheim children were first transported on an ambulance train from the Bergen-Belsen Hospital to the Swedish Transit Hospital in Lübeck. After two days on July 25, 1945, they left Lübeck port and arrived on the next day to Malmö, Sweden.

Many of the children in the Kinderheim that came to Sweden were from the city of Piotrków Trybunalski and were deported from the Piotrków Ghetto on December 4th, 1944.

There were actually two types of children in the Kinderheim in barrack 211, fully parentless and children with mothers. Most of the parentless children left for Eretz Israel already during the summer of 1946 and the last big group of 650 children and youngsters left on January 24th, 1947. 

Numerous Holocaust survivors left Sweden on M/S Drottningholm headed to New York as a final destination.