HOLOCAUST Memorial Day is to be marked in Kendal for the very first time. South Lakeland District Council and its chairman Evelyn Westwood alongside the Lake District Holocaust Project have organised an event called ‘Journey from Hell to Paradise’ The event on Thursday January 23 will include a short ceremony at The Birdcage, Finkle Street at 12 noon. This will be followed by a film installation, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, and exhibition in the Assembly Room, Kendal Town Hall, between 12 noon and 7pm. The exhibition, which will be curated by the Lake District Holocaust Project, will focus on the journeys to South Lakeland. The district welcomed 300 Jewish child Holocaust survivors into its community in 1945. The children spent a period of recuperation in the Lakes before embarking on new lives. Arriving in the Lake District was described by the children as “paradise”. It followed years of unimaginable horror in the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi occupied Europe. The film will be shown on a continual loop and is extremely rare footage from the Imperial War Museum archives in London. The film was lost for many years in archives and it offers a glimpse at a group of Jewish children and refugees waiting in Eastern Europe in 1945, before boarding the aeroplanes that were to bring them to Carlisle airport where they would then journey on to the Lake District. The ‘bird cage’ will be adorned with old-fashioned luggage tags, where school children from across South Lakeland and the public will be able to write messages on the theme of journeys and there will be a special message from Coun Westwood.