Saved from the Holocaust: "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport" (2000)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Documentary

Director: Mark Jonathan Harris

Writer: Mark Jonathan Harris

Stars: Judi Dench (narrator) , Lorraine Allard, Lory Cahn, Hedy Epstein, Kurt Fuchel

Genre: Documentary, World Cinema

Length: 122 minutes

Cinema: 24 November 2000

Country: UK


The documentary recounts a compassionate effort by ordinary people to save Jewish children from Nazi prosecution. In late 1938, Hitler's government was still willing to allow some German-Jews to leave Germany IF they could get through all the red tape required and leave all their money and almost all belongings behind in Germany.

Of all the nations which were willing to accept Jews, only Great Britain responded with a genuine program. 10,000 Jews (but only children) were granted asylum in Britain. This documentary follows the tortured path the children took to get out of Germany--taking trains to Denmark and then ships to Britain--over a period of months until war was declared in September of 1939 and the program stopped. (The United States Congress voted down any program to follow Britain's lead due to intense lobbying by anti-Semitic groups. Only small numbers of younger Jews escaped to the USA from Britain itself, after they had been rescued from the Nazis.)

The film has a great deal of archival footage, as well as interviews with the surviving members of the kindertransport program. Due to the genocide of "The Final Solution" very, very few of these children ever saw their natural parents again.
The film interviews the surviving children, who tell about the adjustments into an alien society. Very often these children were adopted into homes and taken care of as if they were the natural children of the adopted. In other cases, they were used as domestic servants by people who wanted the status of having hired help to show off to their neighbors. And of course there were frictions at school where the young boys and girls came up against language barriers and xenophobic schoolmates and adults. But, in the main, the resettlement stories are positive. And as Nicholas Winton, one of the agents of the Kindertransport Program put it, "I wouldn't say it was a 100 percent success but all the children were alive at the end of the war."

The most heart-breaking parts of the documentary deal with the letters that were sent back and forth between these de facto orphans and their parents who were still trapped in Germany and Austria. Some children's last contact with their mothers and fathers were postcards received via the Red Cross from train stations where they were rounded up to go to Auschwitz and other death camps.


In an ironic twist, many of the young teen aged boys who left Germany in 1938-9 were actually interned by Chamberlain and later Churchill's government as "enemy aliens", some were even shipped off to Australia in prison-like conditions. Once the initial fears about all Germans subsided, the young men were allowed their freedom if they were willing to serve in the armed forces.

After the war, some of the children became British citizens for life, or went to Palestine, but others did return to Germany and the post-war reconstruction efforts. The power behind this story of course is that so many innocent people could have been saved if other nations had followed the British example.

Here is the official site for the film:

http://www2.warnerbros.com/intothearmsofstrangers/

And this is a selection from the Preface to the study guide of the film, written by the documentary producer, Deborah Oppenheimer:

In August 1939, in the days just following my mother’s eleventh birthday, my
grandparents sent their daughter on a train departing Chemnitz, Germany. My
mother was exchanging life with a loving family under the peril of Nazi control for
an unknown future with strangers, in the relative safety of Great Britain. Like the
majority of the 10,000 children saved by the Kindertransport rescue effort, she never
saw her parents again.
Throughout my life, my mother could never speak about the events that brought her
to Great Britain and then to the United States. The few times I tried to break
through her silence she would start crying, then I would begin to cry and would
ultimately retreat—out of love for my mother. She was hiding a profound grief from
her childhood, and I made a silent pact to absorb it.
In 1993, my mother passed away from cancer. As a means of dealing with my loss and no longer fearful of causing her pain,
I went in search of her story. While the Kindertransport had been the defining experience of my mother’s life and had deeply
affected our family, I had never heard it mentioned outside our home, studied it in school, talked about it with friends, or, to
my knowledge, met another Kindertransport survivor. I always had an emotional awareness of the Kindertransport, but
I never knew its history. I decided to learn everything I could in the hopes of bringing it to the widest audience possible.
I wanted people to know what had happened, and used the skills I had developed as a longtime producer (“The Drew Carey Show”)
at Warner Bros. to make my documentary feature debut.
I contacted Mark Jonathan Harris, whose work I had admired in the Academy Award®-winning film The Long Way Home.
Recognizing that we couldn’t possibly present the complete range of experience of a rescue operation which saved so many
lives, we looked for witnesses whose stories would represent what we considered the most characteristic aspects of the
Kindertransport. We read historical accounts, letters, diaries, transcripts, and memoirs. We viewed testimonies and spoke to
Kindertransport survivors around the world whom we found through Holocaust institutions, word of mouth, and books.
Inspired by the hundreds of stories we read and heard, we then retraced the path of the Kindertransport through Germany,
the Netherlands, and England, and attended the 60th Anniversary Reunion of Kindertransport survivors in London.