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Escape to Gwrych Castle

A Jewish Refugee Story

Andrew Hesketh
From 1939 Gwrych Castle in North Wales was home to some 200 young German Jews who had arrived on the Kindertransport. Using the testimonies of survivors and their descendants, this account tells how they formed a Hachshara, or training camp for emigration to Israel, unravels the mystery of its closure in 1941, and follows the subsequent fortunes of its inhabitants.
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RRP £18.99

£7.99

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Product information:
  • Publisher: Calon
  • Year: 2023
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 302pp
  • Illustrated: Yes
  • Dimensions: 222x140mm
  • ISBN: 9781837600069
  • Condition: New
  • Weight: 0.5kg
Product code:
545184
Product information
Full publisher description
In 2020 and 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Gwrych Castle was familiar to the British public as the setting of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! Lesser known is that, at the beginning of the Second World War, this once-grand country house in North Wales became home to around two hundred Jewish refugee children who had been rescued from Europe on the Kindertransport.


Under trying conditions, while the families they had been separated from faced the gravest of dangers, these children and their adult guardians established a Hachshara at Gwrych Castle: a training centre intended to prepare them for the dream of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael), where they hoped one day to be reunited with the families they left behind.


In this fascinating debut, historian Andrew Hesketh tells the story of these refugees and the community they built, shining a light on a chapter of Jewish history that deserves to be far more widely known. He recounts moving moments of friendship, respect, tension and humour as the new arrivals and local residents came to know each other, while the shadows of war loomed ever closer, and the Hachshara project found itself facing an uncertain future.
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