PEOPLE are being invited to have their say about plans for "a world-class visitor experience" telling the story of 300 child Holocaust survivors who found refuge in Windermere.

The arrival of the orphaned boys and girls in August 1945 is one of the most poignant - yet least well known - chapters of the Lake District's 20th century history.

In recent years the children's journey from the hell of the Nazi concentration camps to the paradise of their new-found home at the Calgarth Estate, near Troutbeck Bridge, has been commemorated with a permanent exhibition on the first floor of Windermere library - home of the Lake District Holocaust Project.

However, as director Trevor Avery explained, there is simply not enough space to do justice to the wealth of archive material, such as a child's spinning top found in the Krakow ghetto, and to tell the story fully.

A charitable trust - the Lake District Paradise Project - is forging ahead with an ambitious vision to transform the town's Ellerthwaite library into a multi-million-pound "destination museum and visitor experience".

The trust is keen to find out what the people of Windermere think and is inviting everyone to a drop-in session at the library on Thursday, October 19, between 4pm and 7pm. There is also an online survey at www.ldpp.org.uk.

Project director Trevor Avery told the Gazette it would be "tremendously exciting" to create a world-class visitor experience, library, museum, archive and community hub, for the benefit of locals and tourists from around the globe.

"We've got the opportunity to make Windermere an international library name, like the Wiener Library in London [one of the world's leading Holocaust archives]," he said. "But we need to involve everybody."

The Holocaust children, who came to be known as "The Boys", stayed at the Calgarth Estate for several months, living in dormitories originally built for wartime workers at the Sunderland flying boats factory. The site is now home to the Lakes School.

Residents on the estate welcomed them warmly, and Mr Avery said: "The Lake District and Windermere should rightfully be very proud. It sends out a message globally that it's a welcoming, generous place with a lot of humanity about it."

As Mr Avery explained, back in 1945, the British government said it would take 1,000 children from the liberated camps, but only around 730 were found alive, of which 300 came to Windermere.

"They were a tiny, tiny number of what was a thriving Jewish community in Europe. For that brief period of time, these children that came to Windermere were the survivors of an entire culture."

Mr Avery estimates the orphans now have six or seven thousand descendants, and they include barrister Robert Rinder, TV's Judge Rinder, who is a supporter of the project.

In an interview last year, recalling his Polish-born grandfather, he told a newspaper: "Windermere was his paradise. The locals may never have met a Jew before but they were so welcoming."