Yar, you be here: Into The Arms Of Strangers - Stories Of The Kindertransport > Customer Reviews

Into The Arms Of Strangers - Stories Of The Kindertransport Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 8 Reviews)

A moving documentary told by adults speaking as children
During that relatively small window of time, prior to the beginning of Hitler's conquest of Europe, when exportation rather than extermination was still the prudent solution to the "Jewish Problem", a rescue plan called the Kindertransport was begun which provided for the relocation of Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia into Great Britain. INTO THE ARMS OF STRANGERS is a documentary that examines the Kindertransport program through the eyes of the participants. No broad social commentary here, just remembrances of parents that had to send their kids away to a foreign land and into the arms of strangers so that they might survive the Nazi barbarians. The difficulty of having to provide a whole life's worth of instruction to children just before those devastating last goodbyes. A little girl wondering why, just after Hitler annexed Austria, none of her long-time Austrian friends showed up for her eighth birthday party. Parents desperately trying to keep the harsh reality of Nazi occupation from the innocent little people oblivious to the evil of man. And once the children were safe in Britain, their desperate attempts to get sponsors for parents left behind and for those lucky enough to be re-united with family after the war, having to say goodbye once again, only this time to broken hearted foster parents. This documentary is made more effective by snap-shots of the children, archival footage of Nazi Germany during the late 1930's ( a veritable sewer of anti-Jewish destruction and propaganda), and in this context, the painfully frightening sound effects of broken glass, trains and the voices of children singing in German, which seem strangely perverted - an unfortunate consequence which Germans should never forgive the Nazi's.

Painfully well done
The first moments in the movie refer to a child who is about eight years old - the same age as my daughter as I watched the DVD. Perhaps that set a different tone for me because suddenly, this wasn't a documentary about some monumental thing that happened half a century ago, it was a documentary about the pain of a child who was the same age as my own daughter - and my imagination did the rest of the work for the mothers and the fathers.

This film speaks to the potential goodness in everyone and how the most trying times can create the most remarkable situations. I would highly recommend it to everyone.



Adopted
This is one of the more moving documentaries I have seen. It accomplishes something wonderful--takes the viewer into the lives and minds of a handful of children whose parents managed to get them onto Britain's World War II Kindertransport relief effort.

After the March 1938 Anschluss, Great Britain agreed to accept all Jewish children whose care could be guaranteed, and by November 9 and 10 1938, 431 children were placed. Kristallnacht opened the floodgates, and by September 1939 another 9,354 children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia streamed into Britain with help from 5 groups including B'nai Brith and the Refugee Children's Movement; 1,850 more came via Youth Aliya and agricultural groups. More than 11,000 children were thus saved from Nazi fires that extinguished the lives of 6 million Jewish people, including 1 million children.

The statistics pale, however, next to the human faces and stories that this film provides. Viewers meet perhaps a dozen aging survivors of the trauma that both preserved their lives and separated them from their parents--usually, forever.

Not all parents could stand the strain. One woman recounts how her father pulled her out of the train window as it left the station without her and all the horrors that befell her family afterwards. Each story is more painful and enduring than the last.

These children endured the direst imaginable circumstances, and yet learned afterwards that far worse had happened to their families. There are as many layers as people here, all of whom made something of their lives. Yet the film is accessible to everyone--and especially meaningful for children who were themselves adopted. Alyssa A. Lappen

1 2 3

Next Page