My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports

My dad, Ernest (formerly Ernst) Winter (now deceased), was the boy that is crossing the screen in some of the only film footage of the children arriving in England on the Kinder-transport. He is also the middle child of the Picture Post photo of the three boys with the tags around his neck - a picture from the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Up until I saw this documentary, I had never seen this film footage or photographs before. His picture was on collection cans all around England to raise money for the Jewish Refugee Fund. Watching this has led me on a quest - which has led me to more pictures in books of my dad. It is still going on to this day.

I was so incredibly moved by this documentary. It brought to life in pictures and story what I had only grown up hearing from my dad. The documentary made my dad's story which had legend status in our family, much more real to me. The stories were exactly the same as the ones I heard from my dad. I had only heard them from him, so it was so touching to hear them from other survivors and their children.

In the blasting force of the Holocaust film industry I had worried that Melissa Hacker's touching film might be lost. I had the pleasure of seeing the film in a university theatre and spending some time with its director, and I'm very happy to see it available on video, where its intimacy should do well. This is a family story--Hacker's own mother, who appears in the film, was one of the children transported out of Nazi Germany--and what is most satisfying about it is its close attention to individual lives. And those lives turn out to be deeply illuminating, not least because the stories retain their childlike confusion at the insanity of the adult world. The idea that children should leave the families they loved and take up with new families who didn't even speak German was always somewhat incomprehensible to the Kindertransport emigrants--properly so-- and through their own bewilderment and their permanently mixed feelings of relief, gratefulness, sorrow and guilt we catch some glimpse of the incomprehensibility of the Nazi persecution itself. Because Hacker's touch is so light the weight of the film's message is all the more bearable; and it loses none of its depth by her sensitive treatment.

As with many documentaries on the horrors of Nazi Germany, this one will make you sad and angry. It is the story of the Kindertransports, the transport to Great Britain of thousands of Jewish children out of Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s.

The film is directed by Melissa Hacker, the daughter of Ruth Morley, one of the children who escaped. Mrs. Morley is the main focus, but many children who were involved in the journey speak of their memories. The children were put on trains and 90% of them never saw their parents again. In one heartrending scene we see a crowd of parents bravely waving goodbye to the children that they knew they were unlikely to see again.

I learned from this movie. For one thing, I had never heard of this Kindertransports. For another, I had not realized that most countries refused to take Jewish refugees, the United States in particular. How could this be? I wish more information had been given on this as well as more historical background in general, since this is an important story.

I mentioned being sad and angry, but there is inspiration to be had here as well. That the survivors interviewed went on to make good lives for themselves, many of them in the United States, speaks of their courage and determination and says much about human adaptability and the spirit to carry on. But the scars of their traumas are carried inside and, as we are shown, even passed to subsequent generations.