This blog presents the responses of three academics who specialise in history and memory of the Kindertransport and refugees to James Hawes’ “One Life”, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, released in UK cinemas in January 2023.
The word ‘Kindertransport’ is used to describe the large scale transportation by train of ten thousand endangered, mostly Jewish, children from Austria and Germany to safety in the UK in 1938 and 1939. Though organised and sponsored independently, the same term became used for the Czech and Slovak rescue of endangered children which was organised in 1939 by Nicholas Winton with the help of Trevor Chadwick and other volunteers both in Prague and London: https://www.nicholaswinton.com/exhibition/kindertransport
Dr Jennifer Craig-Norton, author of The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory (IUP:2019)
Towards the end of the film One Life, Nicolas Winton, (outstandingly played by Anthony Hopkins) mutters about his newly found fame as the rescuer of 669 Czech Jewish children before the outbreak of the Second World War: “It’s not about me.” The statement is uttered unironically, but in fact this film is very much about him, and very little about the Kindertransport, the immigration scheme under which the children were allowed into Great Britain, or about the children who were brought over under the programme.
Nevertheless, this superbly acted and produced film succeeds admirably in presenting Winton as a far more complex and contradictory character than he has generally been portrayed as ‘Britain’s Schindler’ and gives appropriate credit to the work of Winton’s colleagues Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, whose roles have long been overlooked. Certainly Winton’s life story makes for a dramatic and moving retelling, and his dogged efforts to find sponsors and foster homes for hundreds of threatened children has earned him well-deserved honour and acclaim. Yet in focusing on the act of rescue and on Winton’s emotional reunion with some of the Czech Kinder he helped bring to Britain, the film misses an opportunity to explore the Kindertransport with the same nuance and complexity as it applies to the character of Nicky Winton. Thus, One Life primarily serves to perpetuate public memories of the Kindertransport as an unambiguously humanitarian act and a shining example of British altruism in the face of Nazi evil.
The film does nod ever so slightly at some of the troubling and tragic legacies of the Kindertransport. Early in the film, the character of young Winton (played by Johnny Flynn) is challenged by a Prague rabbi to consider the seriousness of separating families, possibly permanently, and the placing of Jewish children in non-Jewish homes, risking alienation from their religious and cultural heritage. But these concerns were brushed aside in the same way that the real life Winton once did when challenged on these same grounds, stating: ‘I am about saving lives, not souls.’ Scenes of tearful partings between parents and children, the rejection of children with obvious physical imperfections, the separation of siblings once in England, the lack of vetting of foster families and the loss of most of these children’s families in the Holocaust are all fleetingly shown, but along with the treatment of the children in foster homes and institutions, remain completely unexamined in the film. As the character of Winton himself admits, once he had gotten the children out of Prague, he remained incurious about their fates.
The discordant notes are so brief and undeveloped that they do very little to disturb the building of a heroic and uplifting narrative. Viewers are left to make these connections on their own, and only those with a greater knowledge of the Kindertransport might be able to do so. The average filmgoer on the other hand, is likely to leave the theatre having experienced only a redemptive story of rescue and salvation focused on the heroism of an ordinary man.
Dr Nicola Woodhead, PhD Thesis completed on transmigrant journeys of the Kindertransport
One Life is a solid introduction to the Kindertransport, it highlights the anguish of parents sending their children away, hoping and planning to soon be reunited but not knowing when. The film also portrays some of the history behind the scheme and the wider refugee crisis unfolding. It is a rather sentimental retelling of the Kindertransport but it has sparked conversations. One Life also dives a little deeper beyond the surface, bringing to light the work of Winton’s mother (Babette Winton) and the British rescuers (Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner) who remained in Czechoslovakia. Although, those such as Marie Schmolka (a Czech social worker who worked to help Jews escape Czechoslovakia including via the Kindertransport), go unmentioned.
There are moments of nuance and probing of the traditional understanding of the Kindertransport throughout the film although in these instances they function like Easter eggs, if you know what you are looking at it is possible to find levels of nuance throughout the film, however, to the causal viewer they may go unnoticed. One such scene is a father parting with two of his children who have received a place on a Kindetransport, while his third child does not have a place. The emotions in this scene are heightened by the audience knowing of the difficulty of finding homes and that time is running out for the third child. The child who is remaining in Czechoslovakia has a visible facial disfigurement. In the film, this is never explicitly given as the reason for them remaining. However, disabled children were systematically ruled out of the Kindertransport, save for a few notable examples such as pupils from a deaf school in Berlin relocating to London. A casual viewer of the film is not necessarily to know from this scene why the child was left behind and that most likely would have never found a place on a Kindertransport.
The film, by its nature, jumps between the 1930s and 1980s which feeds into a narrative in the UK that children arrived in the UK integrated and remained. After they arrived at Liverpool Street Station, the children were seen going to foster families. They are next seen surrounding Nicholas Winton at the television studio as adults who grew up in Britain. This is a film about Winton more than the Kinder, and there is limited ability to cover the lives of the Kinder. But the messy in-between, of adolescence, discovering the fate of their families and trying to settle, is missing. The audience sees Kinder who have settled and become British, particularly through Vera Gissing who lived close to the Wintons and became friends. Vera and her sister (Eva Hayman), however, both initially returned to Czechoslovakia before coming back to the UK, and Eva and her family emigrated to New Zealand. Through their family story, there was an ability to add the nuance – even in the form of an Easter egg – of re-emigration and that Kinder did indeed leave the UK as was intended. One Life while touching on some lesser-known parts of the Kindertransport did not delve into the more unpalatable elements.
Dr Emily-Jayne Stiles, author of Holocaust Memory and National Museums in Britain (Palgrave, 2022)
The footage of Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton standing to an audience of kinder as they applaud the heroic efforts that undoubtedly saved their lives is one of those true-life (if carefully orchestrated) moments that representation can rarely do justice. To witness the true torment of a man who knew he could ‘never do enough’ against the antisemitic onslaught throughout Europe in the 1930s is enough to make even the most hardened viewer tearful. The words of Winton, mediated through That’s Life (first aired in 1988), highlight the disappointment that he ‘couldn’t have saved more.’ ‘So many lives could have been saved’, he claimed, ‘if people at the time realised the urgency.’ Watching historical films, we are aware the stories reveal more about present attitudes than of the past they purport to represent. With this, I had high hopes for the potential of James Hawes’ One Life for its engagement with the current discourse on child refugees (and refugees more broadly) in Britain. Whilst the Holocaust was considered unprecedented, the ‘lessons’ it presents have not been lost over the last eight decades. Such ‘lessons’ sit behind multi-million pound investments in government-sponsored Holocaust memory and memorialisation projects.
Despite his reluctance to become a ‘British Hero of the Holocaust’, the film’s central focus sits squarely on Winton, offering only superficial engagement with the enduring theme of refuge and its entanglement with wider political contexts. This was not a new phenomenon in the 1930s, as Winton was acutely aware, and it is not a new phenomenon now. As the media perpetuates the enduring narrative of a ‘refugee crisis’, it seems even a film attracting the likes of Sir Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter CBE is unable (or unwilling) to connect past with present. Whilst the contexts continually change, the causes of flight and responses to refuge are remarkably similar. The film is perhaps a missed opportunity to ask difficult questions and demand uncomfortable answers. Are we, as the audience, expected to identify with ‘Nicky’? Or are we to see ourselves in the reluctant, yet ultimately supportive, British bureaucrats? Perhaps we are expected to see ourselves in the scores of ‘parents’ awaiting the arrival of the helpless ‘foreign Jews’. Whoever the audience connects with, there is no suggestion they should challenge their own thinking towards refugees and refugee policies today.
In Britain, it is no longer a legal obligation to provide the right of asylum to all who enter, yet we are continually reminded of our heritage of kindness towards strangers. What we often fail to recognise within popular narratives of refuge (past and present) is that our opinion matters. Public opinion shapes political opinion, which, in turn, shapes policy. Children are easy to pity, where ‘swarms’ of men are actively used to discourage our sympathies. One Life had an opportunity to challenge how we see the world, to shape how we understand themes of forced migration and how they are ever-present in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, this remained lost as audiences were presented with a heroic and redemptive narrative that sidelined the very real traumas of those forced to flee. It is possible I expected too much of this film, so I will finish with an acknowledgement of its entertainment value and its ability to elicit the expected emotional response; for that it deserves much credit.
The British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies 