Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
A clear-eyed look at the still relevant story of children’s rescue from the Holocaust and the re-discovery of the prescient rescuers
By Nora Lee Mandel
(at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum)
One Life
Directed by James Hawes
Written by Lucinda Coxon & Nick Drake, based on the book by Barbara Winton, originally published in 2014 as If It’s Not Impossible…:The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton
Produced by Joanna Laurie, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, and Guy Heeley
109 mins Rated PG
With: Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Alex Sharp, Marthe Keller, Jonathan Pryce, and Helena Bonham Carter
Released in U.S. theaters March 15, 2024 by Bleecker Street
The success of One Life is the historical information supplied without undue sentimentality. Focusing on its subject’s perspective, it feels as practical as Nicholas Winton himself – who was fond of saying: “If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to do it.”
The story of what Winton accomplished from January to September 1939 in helping to save over 600 mostly Jewish Czech children by getting them to England is not obscure, though it was only nine short months in what would be the life of a centenarian. Director Matej Minac made a trilogy of films that featured him, from the Czech-language drama All My Loved Ones, with Rupert Graves as Winton (1999), the not widely released documentary The Power of Good – Nicholas Winton (2002), and Nicky’s Family, the 2011 English-language version, with narrated re-enactments, interviews, and contemporary dollops of schmaltz to inspire young people today.
One Life corrects misimpressions and misperceptions from these and other tellings. The structure of Lucinda Coxon & Nick Drake’s screenplay achieves reality through debut director James Hawes smoothly toggling between Anthony Hopkins as Winton in a quiet retirement in the suburbs with his wife Grete (played by Lena Olin), helping many local charities, and the intensity of his pre-war rescue work, when he is played by Johnny Flynn.
This film goes a long way to answer people’s usual questions - how did the 29-year-old get the idea? The Refugee Children Movement’s Kindertransports got in motion through various organizations right after the international shock from Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938, when the Nazis were allowing Jewish and other children to leave and Britain was willing to take them in from Germany and Austria. Well-known documentaries have been made about the 10,000 children saved, combining them with his Czech project: Melissa Hacker’s My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports (1996), Mark Jonathan Hacker’s Oscar-winning Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000), both available streaming, and Gülseren Şengezer’s Kindertransports to Sweden (2019). All primarily focus on the experiences of the children, little on the organizers.
Young Winton was not surprised that his politically-engaged leftist friend Martin Blake (played by Ziggy Heath) called to change their winter 1939 ski vacation in Switzerland to Prague, Czechoslovakia to witness the terrible conditions of refugees outside the city. Since Autumn 1938, these families had fled first from the area the Allies had approved for Nazi Germany to annex in western Czechoslovakia, then more when Hitler’s army pushed east. As we see photogenically adorable homeless children surround Winton when he impulsively hands out small pieces of chocolate, he starts to feel it just makes sense to extend the Kindertransports to them.
But why? This film helps explain, through a vague conversation Winton has in lobbying a presumed rabbi (played presumably by Samuel Finzi). Despite his Anglican surname, the family had only just changed it from Wertheim in 1938. His parents wanted to avoid a repeat of the negative experience of being seen as German in England during World War I, like the British Royal Family had changed their Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family name to Windsor in 1917. His paternal grandparents were German Jewish immigrants to England; his mother, originally Babette Wertheimer, was a more recent German Jewish emigré. While his family felt no identification with Judaism, baptized their children Christian in order to fit in, and Winton here shrugs he’s “agnostic”, he, and his daughter Barbara, whose biography and archive were the basis for much of the film, seem fairly oblivious that they met the Nazis’ definition of Jews. The extended family spoke German (Winton had worked for a British bank in Germany earlier in the decade) and were aware of political developments there; he and his friends had read Mein Kampf, so took Hitler seriously –unlike Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. However, when the film uses a phrase like “saving the children from camps”, Winton was referring to the temporary refugee camps; while some adults were starting to be “deported” to “labor camps”, the genocidal actions and extermination camps of the Final Solution that would murder 1.5 million children were not quite conceivable to the outside world.
Only this film makes clear that Winton did not act alone, and gives credit and screen time to his brave, hard-working associates. His friend Martin was in contact with the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia (BCRC) whose original charge was to take care of political dissidents most at risk from the Nazis, protecting them in safe houses while arranging transit to England. The small Committee was run by the dedicated Doreen Warriner (played by Romola Garai). (Warriner’s memoir was published posthumously in 1984, and her nephew produced a biography in 2019.) Winton is seen convincing her to let him head a “Kinder Committee”, so that he had a formal title to use back in London. Her colleague Trevor Chadwick (played by Alex Sharp) became the risk-taking point man in Prague, collecting photographs, affidavits, and the children to the train station, filmed on the site in Prague. His son published a book in 2010 about his father’s and colleagues’ work, and Sharp consulted with other members of the family for insights.
- Helena Bonham Carter as Babette Winton; Anthony Hopkins as Nicholas Winston and Henrietta Garden as Vera [Diamant] Gissing in ONE LIFE, Credit: Bleecker Street courtesy of Bleecker Street
But before Winton wrote pleading letters to every official he could think of anywhere for the children to go, the first person he reached out to was his mother. Now Barbara Winton (played by Helena Bonham Carter), she is a formidable force with the British Home Office, and following through with the children. Carter’s sense of urgency with care implicitly suggests Winton’s model for quick-thinking and action.
Permission for visas was the first step, but the paperwork needed was substantial (and was a bit stricter than the earlier Kindertransports): children had to be under 17 years old, required a specific foster family commitment in advance, and a sponsor to put up £50 pounds (about £4,100 pounds today). Photographs Winton himself had taken in Prague were the ones used first for publicity and fundraising in newspapers, magazines, and everywhere possible. As more came in, he put six to eight photographs on a card to speed potential foster parents’ choices, including in non-Jewish homes. Winton’s priority is emphasized by the title that recalls variations of the Mishna’s “Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world”. The government and the Wintons assumed the children’s stay in England would be temporary, until the emergency was over and they could return home.
Seven transports with over six hundred children were successful. Winton and the team in Prague had organized the eighth, largest transport of 250 children for September 1, 1939 – and it was ready to leave the station when war broke out and this exodus was halted. (Other organizations were able to get a few smaller ones through from elsewhere until 1940.) Warriner and her volunteers are seen frantically burning their files to protect their charges. But the team, especially Winton, were haunted for the rest of their lives by that stopped transport.
Despite that disappointment, Winton held onto a scrapbook about their successes that was prepared by his secretary in London, W. H. Loewinsohn. In the 1980’s, searching for someone who would know how best to preserve and use it for educational purposes, his friend Martin (now played by Jonathan Pryce) put him in touch with an historian specialized in the Holocaust, Dr. Elisabeth Maxwell (played by Marthe Keller), wife of publisher (and originally a Czech Jew) Robert Maxwell, and mother of Ghislaine Maxwell. Her husband’s newspapers carried the story of her contacting the foster parents’ addresses in the scrapbook to find 250 of the now adult children, which led to the BBC programs attracting more, and brought Winton’s efforts to his late acclaim and honors. Featured as a child and then as an adult participating in the TV program was Vera Diamant Gissing (played by Henrietta Garden), who had also written a memoir. She marvels: “Nobody knew who masterminded our rescue. I came face to face with the man who saved my life.” She stayed in close contact with Winton for the rest of his long life, prominent as one of “Nicky’s Children”. The scrapbook is now in the collection of Yad Vashem; hopefully a cataloguer will correct its provenance.
After the war, Winton had again helped refugees, with the new United Nations. At the very end of the credits, the filmmakers post a plea to help refugees today through the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
I applaud Hawes and crew for not reducing this vital and still relevant story to maudlin stereotypes, even as I did shed a few tears.
3/15/2024
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
To the Mandel Maven's Nest Reel Life: Flick Pix
Copyright © 2024