Into the Arms of Strangers

Recent historical cinema has not been kind to Great Britain or the facts. "The Patriot" demonized the redcoats to provide a more despicable foil for Mel Gibson, and "U-571" presented Americans on a kick-ass World War II espionage adventure while barely mentioning that, in real life, the film's feats were accomplished by the Great British.

"Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport," a new documentary, will help both to right the factual imbalance and to shed some light on a little-known effort to evacuate Jewish and other children from Nazi Germany to Britain. The "Kindertransport" ("transport of children" in English) took place during a brief period after Kristallnacht, which made the fate of any Jews remaining in Germany perfectly clear, and before the invasion of Poland and the subsequent declarations of war, which obviously made any peaceful transport between Britain and Germany impossible.

After Kristallnacht, international observers noticed that conditions in Germany and its annexed territories were just as bad as Jewish people had been claiming they were. Although most countries were reluctant to admit large numbers of adult refugees because of the pressure they would place on an already-lackluster employment market, activists were able to persuade Britain's parliament to open its borders to unlimited numbers of children, provided they had sponsors in British households. At the time, Germans were eager to see Jews emigrate, and the Kindertransport was born. (The film notes acidly that a similar plan was proposed in the good old U.S. Congress, but died in committee in part because some believed that separating children from their parents defied the law of God. Nice job, bozos.) This film tells the story of that emigration, beginning with a time before Hitler's rise to power and ending with the children's attempts to find or remember their parents after the war.

While the Kindertransport was only motivated by the highest moral considerations, the separation of parents from children did raise difficult, immediate questions about what a loving parent does in such a situation and what kind of identity separated children would develop in their new country. Although some narration by Dame Judi Dench provides occasional context, the present film is remarkable for the degree to which writer-director Mark Johnathan Harris lets the individual stories of several Kind (now, obviously, quite mature) drive the narrative. These men and women posses the natural eloquence of ordinary people reflecting on something extraordinary and terrible, and their true stories have more power and poignance than most any fictional WWII or Holocaust film. As they follow their diverse paths through the Kindertransport, a sense of the realities of this undertaking accumulates which rings truer than bland generalizations ever could.

Deborah Oppenheimer, producer of "The Drew Carey Show" and daughter of a woman in the Kindertransport, was the driving force behind this film's creation, and she obviously brought in some money for it. While this means the music is a cut above normal documentary fare, and the film has none of the rough edges sometimes associated with low budgets, the money is not always well-used. Harris makes the dumb decision to supplement footage of the Kind themselves talking, archival footage, and pan-and-scan shots of old photos with obviously new abstract footage of certain events in the narratives, filmed in black and white but with jarring modern sound work. This new footage is shot with an unsteady camera which is supposed to convey confusion but instead induces confusion (and nausea), and given the eloquence of the Kinder it is perfectly unnecessary.

Nevertheless, Harris and Oppenheimer have done moviegoers a valuable service in bringing attention to a less-explored aspect of WWII and the Holocaust with this film. Anyone interested in WWII history, documentary filmmaking, or Britons behaving heroically should go have a look.

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