Escape to Gwrych Castle

A Jewish refugee story

Andrew Hesketh

• Publisher: Calon
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781837600069
• eBook ISBN:
  9781915279569
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue: ‘Are you from the castle?’
• Chapter 1: ‘The young generation of a great people’
• Chapter 2: ‘A field in the middle of nowhere’
• Chapter 3: ‘On a dark night’
• Chapter 4: ‘I wanted to do something useful’
• Chapter 5: ‘We had good plans’
• Chapter 6: ‘I didn’t tell them I was German’
• Chapter 7: ‘An old bowler hat’
• Chapter 8: ‘Leck mich am arsch’
• Chapter 9: ‘A very traumatic experience’
• Chapter 10: ‘I couldn’t see any purpose to it’
• Chapter 11: ‘Not quite the haven they anticipated’
• Epilogue: ‘This place gave us a new life’
• Appendix I: Nominal roll of those known to have been at Gwrych Castle between 1939 and 1941
• Appendix II: Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Picture Section