Rebecca Clifford

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In December 1945, nine children aged between four and ten years old arrived at a country estate in Lingfield, Surrey. They were all survivors of Theresienstadt, a Nazi ghetto-camp not far from Prague where they had spent most of their childhoods. The Lingfield orphanage was many things to its different constituents: to the children it was their home, to its funders it was an early memorial to the Holocaust, but to Anna Freud and her circle, it was the site of a radical experiment in child psychology – an experiment that was exceedingly well documented and unfolded without the children’s knowledge or consent. This is the story of the home and its inhabitants through the years of its existence and beyond, probing the question of why this one small institution once drew a global gaze, but also why most people today likely have not heard of it.