Vsichni moji blízcí

Although this film deals peripherally with the rescue efforts of Harry Winton, a British man who came to Prague and saved over 600 Jewish children by evacuating them to London, it is really the story of one of those children, and the family he left behind. When the film starts, in 1939, the Silberstein family seems to have it made. David's father is a wealthy and respected doctor, and his uncle Sam a world-famous violinist. As Hitler's Germany claims first the Sudetenland, then all of Czechoslovakia, however, slowly the walls begin to creep in on their privileged life. We get an excellent view of this life (perhaps a bit idealized, as seen through the eyes of the son), and the changes that force them to send their beloved son away to strangers in a last desperate attempt to salvage something from calamity.

This film tells the story of the family of one of the children saved from the Nazis by Nicholas Winton, a young Englishman. It tells the story simply, without embellishment. The focus of the story is the boy's warm large family, and their failure to escape while it was possible to do so. Despite the superficial similarity of the theme to "Schindler's List", this film is in a sense the direct opposite--instead describing the unbelievable but true acts of an incredible man (Oskar Schindler), it tells the story of very ordinary people, some of whom act decently and humanly, and others don't. It is unreasonable to ask why weren't there more Oskar Schindlers; one inevitably wonders why weren't there more Nicholas Wintons.

Writer Jirí Hubac and Director Matej Minac have created a fine and very different approach to the Holocaust stories of WW II - its insidious origins and relentless destruction of a beautiful Czech family - in the film 'Vsichni moji blízcí' ('All My Loved Ones'). Though the subject matter has been treated in countless films, this relating of the story of a large, happy, well adjusted family in Prague and its gradual disintegration does not dwell on atrocities of the camps but instead slowly unwinds the story of how Hitler's masterplan overtook and crushed so many innocent people.

The Silbersteins include a physician and his wife and son, a brother who is a gypsy of sorts, another brother who is a concert violinist and falls in love with a non-Jew, accepted by his family but eventually rejected by her and her family because of the pogrom, and all manner of extended family circling in the warmth of the good life in 1939. Very gradually the Nazis take over the Czech borders, not really heeded by the Silbersteins ('no one could be as mad as Hitler may seem') and gradually the evacuation and genocide of the Jews begins. Dr Silberstein is introduced to an American Nicholas Winton (Rupert Graves) who has come to Prague to save the children by providing them safe transport to America. The Silbersteins reluctantly release their son when they see that is his only hope for survival: the remainder of the family's future is doomed. The rest of the film deals primarily with the homage to Winton, showing the real man and the many of the 600 children he rescued. It is deeply moving.

The color and camera work is elegant and very much in keeping with the film's emphasis on the dignity of the Silberstein family. The acting by this Czech troupe is excellent, never cloying, always sensitive to the very human response to the black cloud of the Third Reich's Holocaust. In every way this is a film to treasure. Highly recommended. Grady Harp