Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport: Review

In the 1930s when the Nazi Party seized power, they began to institute a series of laws that sought to ostracize the Jewish Germans from society. Slowly, the citizens began to accept this anti-Semitic stance and in every area of life from economics, to business to schooling, Jews were eventually pushed aside. Then the dehumanizing element began and the propaganda began to talk about evil Jews running the world and being responsible for the humiliation of Germany.

In schools German children were actually taught history that was revised to look more and more anti-Semitic. Jewish children were tortured and teased by their classmates until they were unwilling or afraid to return to school.

"I feared every day. I just was most unhappy going to school," Jack Hellman, a German Jew remembered of his childhood. "I was walking on the street, six or seven boys came, called me 'Jew bastard,' and then attacked me and threw me through the plate-glass window. I was cut severely, and I had to go to the hospital for stitching and I didn't want to go to the school there anymore, either. I just felt that I was threatened constantly."

The Nazis were clear in the respect that they did not ant the Jews and were more than willing to ship them out of the German sphere of influence if any nation was willing to take them.

In November of 1938, a Nazi pogrom called "Kristallnacht" occurred. Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues were ransacked and burned. In retaliation to a shooting of a German officer in France by a disgruntled Polish Jew, the SS and the Nazis staged a riot against the Jewish people. Many Jews were killed, arrested or put out of house and home. Because of all the crushed glass from the buildings and synagogues that littered the street, the Nazis called the night "Kristallnacht" or Night of Broken Glass. They were impressed at the damage they had inflicted on the Jews and proud of the results, with the sparkling shards of the glass remains of hard working Jewish places of worship and business. Even more humiliating was that the Germans wanted the Jews to pay reparations for this travesty.

"The children went with the hope that the parents would follow... I did not realize, and I could never realize, that only a year and a half later, from the same railway station, trains would go in the other directions to Hitler's slaughterhouses." - Norbert Wollheim, Kindertransport organizer.

Immediately after the Kristallnacht, the Jews of the world began to implore their governments to react to this horrible event. The Jews of Britain created the idea for an operation to rescue children from the grips of the Nazis, known as the Kindertransport or the Refugee Children Movement. This was once a very well known program but over the years it was overshadowed by the terrible horrors of the Holocaust. The massive relief effort emigrated Jewish children out of German areas by the thousands into England. The organizers tried to get all the children into foster homes but some were moved into large camps, hostels and farms. 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were saved in the end.

Nine months before the beginning of World War II, Quaker and other non-Jewish refugee organizations, banded together to help Jewish parents with the sad but desperate act of sending their children to safety. Many of the parents later succumbed in the Holocaust. Most of the children remained in Britain; others later went to Israel, America, and all over the world.

For more than 60 years the Kindertransport program was not known to the general public except for the children and the families it directly affected.

Appearing before the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain, British Jewish leaders requested help. They wanted the British government to allow the Jewish children and teenagers temporary amnesty in Britain. Later they were to re-emigrate back home when the danger had passed. They promised to pay for the refugee children with guarantees.

In a heroic show of compassion that ended up being unequalled in all the world at the time, the British Cabinet decided that they'd accept the Jewish leaders' proposal. Children up to the age of 17 would be allowed into England unaccompanied by their parents. No official limit was even announced. 300 children came to Britain every week until the start of the war closed down the program.

On December 10, 1938 the first transport left from Vienna with 630 children. Warnings were strict and the Germans did not make it easy to leave. Signs were posted that read: "We remind again that the luggage must contain nothing but the children's personal items. Any forbidden additions will result in the child not being taken along."

In the United States, public opinion prevented the passing of the Wagner-Rogers bill. The congressional bill would have allowed young refugees entry into the country but it was killed in committee. An anti-immigration lobby stated that "accepting children without their parents is contrary to the laws of God." In a shameful decision, Congress voted against supporting the Kindertransport. This has become an overlooked part of America's own blatant inaction in the growing face of Nazi terrorism.

Deborah Oppenheimer's late mother was one of the children in the program known as "kinder." In her lifetime she never heard her mother speak of the events that allowed her to leave German occupied territory or the fate of those who had went along with her. Because of this Ms. Oppenheimer chose to find out more about the Kindertransport program that had allowed her mother to survive and herself be born into this world. She set out to find other kind (singular of kinder or children) to tell the world about what happened.

Writer-director Mark Harris took on the project with Deborah Oppenheimer as producer. They found and interviewed about a dozen survivors for their documentary. Most of the kinder were in their late 60s or early 70s at the time of the filming but they were all articulate in describing their experiences. Every one has a singular story and every one is as different as a fingerprint but all are harrowing, heartbreaking and revealing.

They used archival footage to connect the events that the survivors spoke about with the actual images of the past. This is a unique tribute in words and images to this unbelievably underreported event in the Holocaust history. Of course like many other stories attached to this period of time, they blend hope and despair in equal portions. Nothing involving an undertaking as necessary and as hard to accomplish is without its problems, unexpected outcomes and repercussions throughout the lives of everyone involved.

Though the Kindertransport is described as "an act of mercy unequaled elsewhere," the children were not unscarred by the experience of having to leave behind their parents to travel to an unknown land, whose language and customs were all strange. Hoping that their parents would one day follow, most parents ended up deported to the death camps, some on the very same rail lines that took their children to safety.

All of the stories are recalled by the survivors in static interviews with almost no dramatic reenactment, but they convey deep emotion and even more surprising, honesty about how they felt at the time. Against the high quality footage and photography this is an even more powerful story.

Early footage and tales of times for the children with families at a home that seems impossibly happy considering the quick and dramatic fall of civility with the rapid rise of the Nazis is juxtaposed against images of Swastikas pasted on everything from banners to uniforms to helium filled balloons.

Among the stories is Lore Segal's a ten-year-old girl who impossibly managed to get work visas for their parent by knocking on doors and begging in broken English. The burden on the children was incredible yet they all had found a way to survive.

Then there is Kurt Fuchel who left at seven years old and fortunately was reunited with his parents nine years later. Hs foster parents, Percy and Mariam Cohen, had been kind and fair to him and he found it difficult to face his parents again at 16 years old.

Instrumental in the program was Norbert Wollheim whose efforts saved thousands of children but in the end he lost his own wife and child in Auschwitz.

During the war years some of the older children had to face internment and deportation. The British government interned adult refugees from Germany and Austria in the 1940s. Some of the Kindertransport boys over 16 were deported to Canada and Australia.

Though a success overall, most of children lost their homes and family forever. The Nazis destroyed six million Jews, 1.5 million of them children. While the children still suffered from feelings of loss, guilt and displacement (some even faced a certain kind of indentured servitude in some English homes) the heroism and compassion of the British and those who arranged for them to be transported cannot be diminished.

Many moviegoers have seen stories of the Holocaust told from every angle of compassion, hope, despair and horror in movies like, "Schindler's List," "Sophie's Choice," "Life is Beautiful," and "The Pianist."

Even "The Diary of Anne Frank" in film and literary versions and "Night" by Elie Weisel have been explored in depth by a number of viewers and historians seeking to gain and insight into the Holocaust and its effects.

"Into the Arms of Strangers" offers a completely different view of this tragic event and all through the compassion of people who only wanted to help save some of the future of the Jewish people through rescue of the children. The stories are sad because the children, for the most part, were never reunited with their parents but more than that the children, too young to deal with the great big issue of impending doom, only saw the separation from their parents and wondered why. In hindsight it seems that most of those interviewed have come to grips with the enormity of what their parents had done for them and regretted their naiveté of youth. Only later on in life did they come to realize the sacrifice and love their parents had.

The director Mark Jonathan Harris thought at first that there was no reason to do another Holocaust film.

"I think there's a certain Holocaust exhaustion we all share, and having just done this other documentary about the Holocaust," he said. "I was initially reluctant to revisit that period unless I felt there was something really fresh and different to explore. As I got into doing the research, I realized this was a story that hadn't been told before, and an incredibly moving one."

What took him in was the loss the children had to face coping with great childhood trauma of separation from home and family. He found an "extraordinary complexity and richness of their experiences."

Also he felt that the universal message and appeal to parents and not just to Jewish people was what also attracted him to the story. It was a way to connect a whole new group of people to the events of the Holocaust through a basic human response to children in danger and the choices that had to be made.

He said in an interview: "Ultimately, the film is about the resilience of children and their ability to transcend catastrophic losses... You can see how their experience has shaped them, how it has haunted them all their lives, and yet you can see how they were still able to go on and lead such productive lives."

In the end the film also conveys a sense of connection to modern events. In our own time there are tragic deaths going on all around the world. By appealing to that base sense, that primitive desire to protect our young, the director all but insures the message will get through and not just as a remembrance of the past but also as a lesson for the present.

Since the events of the Holocaust are so well known in the general over arcing sense, the director concentrated on the specific stories of the kinder. The people are all familiar to us as elderly men and women, some with a German or Austrian coloring to their speech, some with a perfect British accent and other sounding almost mid-American. These are the people you see shopping or in schools or libraries but you would never brand them as "survivors" they seem to recount the events with such clarity as if they had been told to them very recently.

The children became witnesses to the hospitality of strangers in a time of great need. In historical context we see that the offering of one's home to a child when the world has descended into violence and hatred is an important sacrifice worth giving. In the after effects of what some thousands of Britain did for the Jewish children they allowed thousands more to come into the world, not only preserving a heritage but a spark of life and of hope for the world. Just as important (or more so) than the story of Anne Frank, it is through the children that we learn the greatest lessons about the most horrible events that adults can inflict upon each other. And while "Into the Arms of Strangers" is not the horror show of most Holocaust movies that tracks the depravity of man against man, it also exposes the personal hell inside the minds of the children.

In comparison to the insane ideas of Hitler and his henchmen, their twisted and ridiculous interpretations of supposed intellectual philosophies and sciences, the children come across with a greater sense of dignity, grace and wisdom.

Ursula Rosenfeld described an event that directly affected her before the Kindertransport when she knew the world around her had changed for the worst. She described a birthday that her mother planned for her just when the Nazi propaganda concerning the Jews was taking hold of the German public:

"The table was set," she said. "We were-I was sort of very excited. Nobody came. Not a single child came to this birthday party. And so, that was the first terrible blow to me. I know it sounds trivial, but it was the first sort of comprehension for a child to understand that you're ostracized, that there's something different about you."

Even in her adult years she considers the event trivial but it reveals more about the nature of man and events of the time than almost anything else. First that the effects of Nazi ideology had perverted the children or at least the parents to the extent that normal events like a birthday party take on a revelation of significant proportions.

When Hedy Epstein was told by her parents that they wanted her to go on the Kindertransport she described the painful event like this:

"I said to my parents, 'I'm really a "Gypsy" child, and you're now trying to get rid of me. You adopted me, and now you no longer want me.' I must have really deeply, deeply hurt my parents."

Years later she expressed her regret at the remarks it is a painful reminder to anyone who can comprehend it the great sacrifice the parents were making. Never knowing for sure if their daughter will realize that they did what they had to out of deep and unconditional love.

"The culture shock was very great," Bertha Leverton, another kinder said.

That was another burden the children had to bear. They were being sent away by their parents but no matter what the organizers or foster parents did, there was no way to deny the extreme shock the children were going to experience in a foreign country so far from the home and language they had known.

Although the culture shock was great there were some moments of joy. Playing with children who did not care or were not constantly made aware that they were Jewish and therefore somehow different and less human than they.

Jack Hellman told of encountering some other children in England and "when it was time for dinner, they said, 'We'll see you tomorrow.' I was so excited-I was absolutely so exuberant, I ran to my house mother and told her, 'Somebody who's not Jewish wants to see me tomorrow.'"

Hope was high at first that the separation was temporary but the loss of that hope seemed somehow akin to death. While it was still possible to write the children received letters from their parents:

Marietta Ryba's mother: "As you can well imagine, you have been constantly in our thoughts. We still see your face before us in that window of the railway carriage."

Sylva Avramovici's father: "My dearest little mouse, hopefully this letter will reach you already in your new home, where you surely will enjoy your stay. Be a very good little girl. Be obedient."

Sylva Avramovici's mother: "I was very happy with your dear little letter, only there shouldn't be so many spelling errors!"

Lilly Lampert's mother: "If only I could see you just for a tiny moment. But as it is, I can only write letters full of longing."

Lorraine Allard's mother: "I keep running to the mailbox. Every line from you overwhelms me. Every day I thank God that you are in such good hands. But please show your gratefulness."

Lorraine Allard's father: "Your letter of yesterday was again so sweet and written with so much love that tears came running down your mommy's face. Your writing is so natural, it makes me imagine that you're standing before me."

Eventually the inevitable war came and soon the hope that the children kept was lost. They were themselves gypsies, caught between cultures, homeless, abandoned and most likely alone in the world.

Hedy Epstein told of a letter she received from her mother:

"She's saying that she's traveling to the east, and is saying a very final goodbye to me. But for many, many, many years, I mean, I would see the postcard in front of me, and I would see she's saying 'traveling to the east,' and yet I would understand that she's saying that she's traveling in an easterly direction. And then I would say to myself, 'Well, maybe she's going back [home] to Kippenheim, and maybe that's good.' And the final goodbye, I didn't understand."

One Czech kinder remembers the letter which she wrote to her parents that was returned to her with only "Deported to Auschwitz, 1944" written on the back. And that was how she found out.

Far from the gratitude that the parents of the kinder wanted the children to show there was great distress and sense of confusion in each of them.

Lore Segal described it best of her situation when she first arrived in England:

"I have an analogy for this. When all of us have had the experience of finding a bird with a broken wing, and you pick up this bird and you hold it in your hand. And you think it's going to sit there, quietly, sweetly with its warm feathers and be darling. It's not. What it does is immediately to use its muscles, and it's a very uncomfortable thing to hold in your hand because there's this fluttering. What he wants is to get away. It may need you to hold it and to nurse it, but what he wants is to get the heck out of there. And I think that's what we were like. Certainly, that's what I was like. I was not nice to have around."

Most of the grown kinder had their own demons that followed them through their entire lives. Knowing that they were saved was a good thing but the guilt that they felt for having survived while so many of their friends and of course their parents did not was a hardship they carried all their lives.

"I never dreamt that one could be so lonely and go on living with this constant fear for our loved ones," said Eva Hayman.

The kinder have a very special position in history, as do those who honor them with this documentary and those who watch it. They are forced to remember but not in the same way that is expected in the traditional sense. Remembering for some of the kinder meant action and activism. To be actively engaged with the world is an important lesson to take from this documentary. Many thousands of people became actively engaged when the call came and they answered that call. As a result 10,000 children lived to see better days.

In the experiences of each and every one of the survivors of the kinder is the seed of the future. Some have gone on to become activists, writers, soldiers, businessmen, designers and everything else that you can imagine.

Lore Segal, the writer, saw it as a gift. She felt that she would never have been liberated to experience the world in so many different places and so many different people had she not been on the Kindertransport. This has fed her fiction-writing career. Lore takes the artist's approach to framing her place in history.

Hedy Epstein says that she remembers but also does good things with her memories:

"I certainly do my share of remembering, but remembering also has to have a present and a future perspective. You can't just stop at remembering. I don't think I ever made a conscious decision to devote myself to human rights and social-justice issues. Someone helped me. I can't pay back or thank some of the people who helped me, but I can do something for other people."

Alexander Gordon came to a conclusion about himself as a result of the events: "In 1938 I escaped deportation in Poland. I got out of Germany on the Kindertransport. I was meant to survive. When I look at my children, and my grandchildren, I know there was a purpose to my life."

That is one man's perspective. Imagine the perspective of the millions who might have been had more people had the fortitude and heart to do what was necessary in the days before World War II. Each individual that was saved was allowed to experience a full life. Each Jew that was killed had generations of future souls denied the world. No one knows what those missing souls might have accomplished.

Still, there are tragic-comic moments that tear at the heart. Lory Cahn, was chosen for the Kindertransport but her doting father could not physically let go of her as the train started to pull away. As a result Lory was yanked out of the oversized train window landing on the platform bruised and bloodied but in the arms of her ecstatic father. Denied the chance to go on the Kindertransport, Lory ended up in Auschwitz. She survived and holds no ill feelings for her father. She is well aware that her father's love was a bond he could not sever from his precious daughter and she understood that.

This is the story of one particular aspect of the Holocaust. Some may say that it is not the worst but in a sense it is the most telling. It reveals the complexity of the time, when parents, even when offered the opportunity to free their children to a safe haven, sometimes found it difficult to let go, in some cases very literally. It's also a tale of childhood lost forever to the most damaging separation a child must ever know. And of course it is the story of those who gave their homes, their time and their compassion to strangers, children who were sometimes not a s grateful or cooperative as you might want them to be but nevertheless expect given the circumstances. Driven by guilt, resentment, heartbreak and unfathomable inner turmoil, the Kindertransport children were as much victims of the Holocaust as they were survivors.

In the end, it is a story of courage. Courage for those who went out on a limb for strangers, courage of the parents to let go of their children to those strangers for their safety and the courage of the children to endure and then make a life for themselves in a world not only not of their own making but a thousand miles away in a country so much different than their own.

According to the Kindertransport website: "Among us are at least one Nobel Prize winner, a very well known screen writer, a famous costume designer for stage and screen (she turned Dustin Hoffman into a woman in "Tootsie"), scientists, writers, doctors, artists, philanthropists, etc."

"Survival is an accident," Norbert Wollheim, Kindertransport organizer.

References:

Into The Arms Of Strangers - Stories Of The Kindertransport (2000), Director: Mark Jonathan Harris, Studio: Warner Home Video, DVD Release Date: August 28, 2001, Run Time: 117 minutes

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (Paperback) by Mark Jonathan Harris (Editor), Deborah Oppenheimer (Editor), Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2001, ISBN-10: 1582341621

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0248912/

http://www.childrenwhocheatedthenazis.co.uk/history.htm

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

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/into_the_arms_of_strangers_stories_of_the_kindertransport/

http://www.asylumsupport.info/

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1802761044/info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Arms_of_Strangers:_Stories_of_the_Kindertransport

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005260

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Penzias.html

http://www.kindertransport.org/

Movie Production Profile:

Directed by Mark Jonathan Harris
Produced by Deborah Oppenheimer
Written by Mark Jonathan Harris
Starring Judi Dench (narrator)
Music by Lee Holdridge

Lorraine Allard, kind
Lory Cahn, kind
Mariam Cohen, foster mother of Kurt Fuchel
Hedy Epstein, kind
Kurt Fuchel, kind
Alexander Gordon, kind
Franzi Groszmann, mother of Lore Segal
Eva Hayman, kind
Jack Hellman, kind
Bertha Leverton, kind
Ursula Rosenfeld, kind
Inge Sadan, kind (Bertha Leverton's sister)
Lore Segal, kind
Robert Sugar, kind
Nicholas Winton, rescuer
Norbert Woolheim, rescuer

Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release date: September 7, 2000

Produced with the help of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.