Harris won the Best Documentary Oscar for 1997’s The Long Way Home, which chronicles the difficult paths traveled by Holocaust survivors in fractious, postwar Europe. His new film treads a similar path, and if anything it packs more emotional wallop than its predecessor. The kindertransport referred to in the title was a short-lived attempt by the British government (under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain) to intervene on the behalf of endangered Jewish children ranging in age from newborns to 17-year-olds. Fully aware of the incendiary hatreds boiling just below surface of Germany and its soon-to-be satellite holdings, and willing to open its borders a fraction to receive the lost children of the era, British and German Jews worked together to “place” thousands of children in the care of British foster families. It’s a wonder any of them made it, really. Harris points out that the actual transporting of children began nearly on the eve of WWII and had overloaded ships full of squalling, unhappy tots ferrying across a decidedly inclement English Channel. Just getting the necessary exit papers, visas, and “sponsorship” from a relative or interested party in the British empire was a mighty task to overcome for the parents of the children. Once a child made it out, however, not everything was sun and roses and Guinness pints down at the pub. The blitz had yet to begin, and Von Braun’s buzzbomb V2s were years away from laying waste to Sheffield, but as one aged interview subject recalls (and as narrator Judi Dench later reiterates) some of the kids ended up in servants positions, forced to do menial chores for their new hosts. But that was the exception more than the rule. To a one, these now-grown children with whom Harris has spoken express little but unwavering pro-British patriotism. The sun had yet to set on the British empire in 1939 and these weary adults testify to their thankfulness that someone, anyone, picked them up and took them out of hell. More than a million and a half children are believed to have perished in the Holocaust. That even 10,000 survived due to this very British mission of mercy speaks volumes for the English. The U.S., Harris points out, did nothing, killing a similarly themed bill in Congress and isolationistically harumphing the increasingly brutal treatment of Jews and other ethnic minorities by the Nazi blackguards. The kindertransport is unfamiliar to most these days and it goes without saying that Harris performs a great service in the eyes of history with his film, which is tightly edited between stock footage of a grim Germany and starkly lit contemporary interviews with the survivors. It can seem, at times, that every other award-winning documentary is about the Holocaust, but the horrors of war and genocide do indeed make for harrowing, poignant filmmaking, still resonating as powerfully today as when these black events first unfolded.
This article appears in December 15 • 2000.