Unique footage of Holocaust survivors in Prague shown in London

Recently discovered footage of Polish and Czechoslovak Jews leaving Prague for Britain in 1945 was shown for the first time on Tuesday at London's Imperial War Museum. The four and half minutes of film show 732 teenage Holocaust survivors heading for Britain, a country many of them would later make their home. Among them was Ben Helfgott, a Polish Jew from near Lodz, who was at Tuesday's premiere.

"During the war, when the Germans occupied Poland, I was living in a town which was the first ghetto in the General Gouvernment, as it was at the time. We lived in the ghetto for nearly three years, and then I was in different labour camps and concentration camps. I finished up at the end in Theresienstadt [Terezin, in North Bohemia] and that's where I was liberated at the age of fifteen and a half."

So you arrived in Britain as a teenager, as a young man who had presumably seen many terrible things.

"Yes."

And presumably you lost many members of your family in the Holocaust.

"Well, I lost practically all my family. I lost, on both sides - on my mother's side and on my father's side, about 32 cousins. Only two cousins survived."

Tell me about the film which premiered at the Imperial War Museum yesterday. This was the first time the material had been shown publicly. What were your feelings when you saw this film about your fate?

"Well, the producer of the film phoned me up and said - I'm at the Imperial War Museum and I've got this film, it's four and a half minutes long, and I have a feeling it might be your group, the group you came with. So I got him to send it to me, and he did. When I put it on I couldn't believe what I was seeing in front of me. I was transported back almost 60 years, and there I saw ourselves the way we used to be soon after our liberation. Of course I was very excited. Those who were possible to recognise, I recognised them all, immediately. Because we are like a family. We keep close together. We're a close-knit family. When we came to England we had nobody else, we had only ourselves, we had no family, so we were the family. When we growing up, when we got married, we were at the wedding. So it was something very, very special."