Two films depict the rescue of over six hundred children from Nazis
The 2023 biopic One Life concludes
with a very moving scene. An elderly man is surprised by a televised celebration
of heroic deeds he performed when he was young. I could not resist the scene's
power. I cried. I made sniffling sounds. I didn't even try to apply the
emotional brakes.
If only the rest of the movie were as
good as that final scene.
One Life dramatizes the life of Sir Nicholas
George Winton MBE. When he was 29 years old, Winton participated in an effort
to save Jewish children from oncoming Nazis. His heroism warrants an uplifting,
inspirational, unforgettable film. I was worried when I saw that One Life would
be released in the US on March 15. Early March is part of the "dump months"
when movies that haven't tested well are released.
One Life is not a bad movie. It's just not good
enough. I'd give it a six out of ten, but, given that the subject matter is so
important and so appealing, I will nudge that up to a seven. Nicky Winton
deserves an eleven out of ten.
As I left the theater, I asked, "Who was Nicholas Winton? Why did he perform these heroic acts? How did he perform them?" One Life didn't answer those questions for me. I spent hours reading about Winton. I stumbled across a movie I'd never heard of before. Nicky's Family is a 2011, English language, Czech and Slovak documentary. It is currently streaming for free. Nicky's Family moved me deeply, answered my questions, and worked for me.
Nicholas Winton (1909 – 2015) was born
in London. His parents were German Jewish immigrants named Wertheim. During
World War I, they encountered anti-German prejudice. In an effort to
assimilate, they converted to Christianity and changed their last name to
Wortham. After the war, they changed back to Wertheim, but eventually switched
to Winton. Nicholas was baptized in the Church of England. At the elite Stowe
school, young Nicholas attended chapel regularly and chose to be confirmed as a
Christian. Later he self-identified as an agnostic and a socialist.
Winton's father was a successful banker.
The three Winton children grew up in a twenty-room mansion in West Hampstead. At
Stowe school, young Winton made connections that lasted for years, including
with charismatic Stowe headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh. Roxburgh said that his goal,
as an educator, was to produce young men who were "acceptable at a dance
and invaluable in a shipwreck." Winton fenced at Stowe and he would
eventually be accepted to his nation's Olympic team. He would never compete,
though, as World War II canceled the games. After Stowe, Winton fenced at Salle
Bertrand in London. There he fenced against British aristocrat, politician, and
antisemite Oswald Mosley. Hitler attended Mosley's second wedding.
Winton was very gifted at mathematics. His
father mapped out a career path: international banking, just like dad. Winton's
twenties were devoted to his career and to athletics. He worked, inter alia, in
Germany and with a company that had business in Czechoslovakia.
Winton was doing well, but during the
Depression many were suffering. Concerned for the plight of those less
fortunate, Winton joined the Labour Party and became friendly with center-left
members of Parliament including Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, Stafford Cripps and
George Russell Strauss. His conversations with these persons heightened Winton's
awareness of the menace Hitler posed.
In September, 1938, Great Britain,
France, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed the Munich Agreement. This
agreement handed Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland over to Nazi Germany. British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain called the agreement "Peace for our
time." His assessment is one of the most notorious blunders in history.
World War I had ended just ten short
years previously. World War I caused massive loss of life and devastation. Mechanized
warfare and the use of gas horrified the public. Trench warfare might involve
young men losing their lives over mere feet of territory. Gertrude Stein coined
the term "Lost Generation;" Hemingway popularized it. In World War I,
"The flower of youth and the best manhood of the peoples" was "mowed
down." Survivors felt "disoriented, wandering, directionless." People
tired of the recent World War were not eager to fight another one. Sadly, their
reluctance helped make another world war inevitable.
Other factors contributed to complacency
about Hitler. In the early twentieth century, social Darwinists like
bestselling American author Madison Grant had paved the way to make
antisemitism and anti-Slavic racism acceptable. Not just Oswald Mosley admired
Hitler. Hitler believed that British King Edward VIII, later, the Duke of
Windsor, was on Hitler's and Germany's side. Those under the sway of social
Darwinism felt that domination by orderly and superior Germany was just what
Jews and Eastern Europeans needed.
In short, even though Hitler was clearly
a menace, many people wanted to pull the blankets over their heads and ignore the
threat. Some historians today argue that had the West resisted Hitler in 1938,
Czechoslovakia could have won a costly victory against Nazi Germany. Mark
Grimsley, Ohio State history professor, writes that "Germany was not yet ready
for a major war … The Czech army alone could have fielded 19 active and 11
reserve divisions against 37 active German divisions. Assuming that the British
and French launched a full-scale assault against German defenses along the
Siegfried Line … the result would have been a prompt defeat for Germany." Alas,
we can't turn back the clock.
After the signing of the Munich
agreement, approximately 200,000 refugees flooded into the rest of
Czechoslovakia, concentrating in Prague. Perhaps 30,000 were Jews. Others were
political activists and writers. They congregated in squalid and chaotic
refugee camps. Humanitarians wanted to save as many of these people as they
could. Their prescience is remarkable. Probably very few people, in 1938, could
imagine the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust, that is, the systematic
murder of millions of innocent and defenseless civilians, including men, women,
and children.
Nicholas Winton has been receiving much
deserved attention, including in the films One Life and Nicky's
Family. But Winton was not alone. Martin Blake was a Labour Party member,
an instructional master at the Westminster School, and Winton's friend. In
December, 1938, Blake and Winton had planned to take schoolboys on a skiing
holiday in Switzerland. Blake phoned Winton and told him to forget about
skiing. He needed to come to Prague, Blake said. In Prague, Winton met Doreen
Warriner.
Doreen Warriner OBE (1904 – 1972) was an
English economist. She became the representative of the British Committee for
Refugees from Czechoslovakia. In October, 1938, Warriner arrived in Prague. Warriner
assumed that Hitler would eventually take over all of Czechoslovakia; that anticipated
military takeover would occur in March, 1939. Warriner knew she was in a race
against time. She turned to Quaker and other aid organizations. Funding came
from France, the UK, and Canada. She first helped male political refugees
escape to England, without their families. Eventually Warriner and her
colleagues facilitated escapes for an estimated 15,000 refugees. The Gestapo
menaced Warriner, so she left Prague in April, 1939. Back in England, in 1941,
Warriner was honored as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British
Empire "for services … in connection with refugees leaving Czechoslovakia."
Marie Schmolka was a key feature of
Winton's rescue of Jews. Back in 1938, Czech journalist Milena Jesenska wrote
this dramatic description of Schmolka's daring efforts. Schmolka "knows
personally every person who has crossed the border in the last five years. She
knows their destinies, she knows their dangers. Under the flood of these
destinies, it was as if her own destiny did not matter. She moves eternally
between life and death, between the London, Paris and Prague authorities. She
sees almost nothing but hopelessness, and after a terrible effort she manages
to wring out a little hope: but she is as wonderfully calm as religious people
tend to be."
Marie Schmolka was a Czechoslovak Jewish
feminist, Zionist, and rescuer of Jews. She began working with Jewish refugees
in 1933, after Hitler took power. In 1936, Schmolka "became the only
Czechoslovak representative on the Commission for Refugees at the League of
Nations" according to a 2023 article in a Czech magazine. In a
2021 article, The San Diego Jewish World claims
that it was Schmolka, not Winton, who devised the plan to send Jewish children
to Britain. Schmolka realized that "Britain would be willing to accept
numbers of children if they were sent for temporary shelter … They would be
welcome only if they were sent alone, without their parents." Winton, who
never met Schmolka, accepted Schmolka's plan, according to this article. Czech
history Professor Anna Hajkova reports that "Schmolka was a global
player in saving refugees from Nazi Germany. She attended the 1938 Evian
conference and went to Poland to help Jews … I don't want to dismiss the work
of younger guys like Winton, but … she was much more important."
Schmolka worked herself to death, dying
of a heart attack at age 46 in 1940. Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk
eulogized Schmolka. She was cremated and has no grave. A plaque in Schmolka's honor says, "Schmolka
was arrested by the Gestapo and gruelingly interrogated, her life at extreme
risk … Her health had been broken by her extreme efforts to save Jews and
others … Marie Schmolka saved thousands upon thousands of lives."
Schmolka is a "forgotten hero." "The woman who
had saved thousands seemed lost from memory forever." In a
2019 article, the Guardian mentions current efforts
in Prague to "rescue Schmolka from obscurity." "Czech historians
say her work deserves similar acclaim to that given to Sir Nicholas Winton,"
the Guardian reports.
I don't remember any mention of Schmolka
in either One Life or Nicky's Family. Her name is not listed in
the credits for either film at the Internet Movie Database.
Beatrice Gonzales was a Canadian Quaker
and a schoolteacher. Alarmed by Hitler's rise, she traveled to Europe and
devoted herself to refugee rescue. She has not been awarded the medals that
others have, but her family endowed the Beatrice Wellington Gonzales Memorial
Scholarship at the University of British Columbia. It commemorates "her
strenuous and successful efforts to protect and salvage the lives of political
refugees in Europe prior to and during World War II … special consideration"
will be given to student recipients "who like Miss Gonzales are concerned
about the plight of individuals."
A newspaper dubbed Trevor Chadwick "The
Pimpernel of Prague," after the Scarlet Pimpernel, a fictional hero who
saved aristocrats from the French Terror. Chadwick is identified less
romantically in a book written by William Chadwick, his son. Chadwick the
younger describes his father as an unconventional man who drank too much and
who had a "distaste for convention, for rules, for etiquette, and a
dislike of any sort of pomp and circumstance," qualities that, while "attractive,"
might "spill over into irresponsibility."
Nevertheless, Chadwick was posthumously
named a British Hero of the Holocaust. His description is poignantly worth
quoting.
"Chadwick was a schoolmaster who
quit his job … to risk his life forging papers for Jewish refugees. Working
closely with Sir Nicholas Winton, Doreen Warriner and others, Chadwick
organised the evacuation of 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia … Chadwick
was responsible for ensuring every child got on the train safely when leaving
their parents and personally escorted the children from Prague to London.
Chadwick once recalled a trip he made from Prague to London with 20 Jewish
children in March 1939, just days before German forces invaded Czechoslovakia: 'They
were all cheerfully sick … except a baby of one who slept peacefully in my lap
the whole time.' Sir Nicholas Winton, a key figure in the Kindertransport,
later commented that Chadwick was 'the real hero' as he 'did the more difficult
and dangerous work after the Nazis invaded … he deserves all the praise. He
managed things at the Prague end, organising the children and the trains, and
dealing with the SS and Gestapo.'"
Summoned by his friend Martin Blake, twenty-nine-year-old
banker Nicholas Winton observed the humanitarian tragedy and chaos in
Czechoslovakia and focused not on the vastness of the task at hand nor the
danger posed by Nazism. He focused on children. He harnessed his remarkable
skills at organization. He called on the youthful stamina of an Olympic-level
athlete. He would regularly work till one a.m. and start work again at six a.m.
He exercised the boundless self-confidence of a beloved son of successful
parents. His mom helped. And Winton benefitted from the work of the above-mentioned,
lesser-known heroes and heroines.
Winton would, eventually, assign himself
a title, design his own letterhead and rubber stamps, and begin asking everyone
he could think of to help facilitate the removal of children from danger, and
their entry into foster homes. He didn't just manifest the emotional gift of
compassion. His analytical skills developed something like a big machine of his
own invention. He had to, first, compile a list of potential child refugees.
Just getting the list was a challenge he met by fibbing to five competing refugee
committees that if they didn't get him a complete list within 24 hours, he'd
use a competitor committee's list. He required a photo of each child, one that
made the child look attractive to potential foster parents. Each child needed a
medical certificate and there had to be fifty pounds – about four or five
thousand dollars in today's money – for the child's repatriation once danger
passed. He needed passports and visas. The transit papers had to be good enough
to convince Nazis checking documents. Winton would later acknowledge that he
used forgery when necessary. Even after a transport was approved, Nazis might
stop it. Winton would later report that he had to dig up money for bribes.
Winton approached the US. America kept
the door closed. Some previous history explains why. Between c. 1880 and 1924,
American saw a flood of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. These
immigrants were largely impoverished peasants. They smelled, they behaved in alien
ways, they were often Jewish or Catholic, both religions hated by the likes of
the Klan, and they lacked formal education. Social Darwinism identified them,
not as people from a different culture who could Americanize with time and training,
but as inferior species of humans who could never assimilate and would always
be a burden.
"From the 1920s to the 1960s,"
The Saturday Evening Post "was one of
the most widely circulated and influential magazines for the American middle
class." In the early twentieth century, the Post published a series
of articles by bestselling novelist Kenneth Roberts. Roberts voiced the social
Darwinist point of view. He expressed special contempt for Eastern Europeans. In
1920, Roberts wrote in the Post that "dirty … backward … odiferous
… thickheaded … illiterate" Eastern Europeans who sleep with "sheep
and cows and pigs and poultry" could never become Americans any more than
a "pug dog" could become a "race horse."
In 1924, America passed restrictive
immigration legislation that reduced the allowable number of immigrants from
Eastern and Southern Europe. Breckinridge Long made sure that the 1924 act was
upheld throughout World War II, in spite of the Nazi threat to Jews and others.
Long, who ran unsuccessfully for office as a Democrat and who served two
Democratic presidents, was a personal friend of American President Roosevelt.
Long served as Assistant Secretary of State during World War II, between 1940
and 1944. Long called Mussolini's Italy "the most interesting experiment
in government to come above the horizon since the formulation of our
Constitution." After reading Mein Kampf in 1938, Long wrote
in his diary, "Have just finished Hitler's Mein Kampf. It is
eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of Communism &
chaos. My estimate of Hitler as a man rises with the reading of his book."
Long didn't have a problem only with
Jews. Long used his power to prevent racially undesirable immigrants "from
Russia and Poland," including Jews, from entering the United States. Long
denounced Eastern Europeans as "entirely unfit to become citizens of this
country … they are lawless, scheming, defiant, and in many ways unassimilable"
Long condemned not "the Jew alone" but "all that Slav population
of Eastern Europe."
Not just the US threw up barriers to
rescue. Escaping children crossed to England from the Hook of Holland. The
Netherlands closed its border to Jewish refugees after Kristallnacht in
November, 1938. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee hunted down and returned
Jews to Germany (see here.)
Additionally, Winton encountered some
minor resistance from a couple of rabbis. They asked him if he was placing
Jewish children in Christian homes. Yes, he replied. "That must stop,"
they ordered.
"It won't stop," he told them.
"And if you prefer a dead Jew in Prague to a live one who is being brought
up in a Christian home, that's your problem not mine."
Winton's wartime heroism remained
unknown until 1988. Winton's wife, Grete Gjelstrup, who had resisted the Nazis
in her native Denmark, was cleaning the attic when she came across a scrapbook
that documented Winton's refugee work. She gave it to Holocaust scholar
Elizabeth Maxwell, wife of media baron Robert Maxwell and mother of Ghislaine.
(Ghislaine Maxwell would be convicted in the US of sex trafficking in 2021.)
Esther Rantzen, of the TV show That's Life, hosted a broadcast in which
Winton was reunited with many of the children, now all grown up, that he had
saved fifty years earlier. This emotional reunion brought attention to Winton's
wartime work. Winton remained in touch with his "children" until his
death at age 106 in 2015.
Why did Winton's wartime heroism remain
hidden for so long? Throughout his life, Winton was focused on the needs of
right now. One suspects that that focus on the present moment helped him
tremendously in his refugee work. Once the Nazis made that work impossible,
Winton moved on to the next task at hand. He served in the RAF during the war.
He helped with refugee resettlement after the war. For the Reparations
Department of the International Refugee Organization, he took on the "grisly process" of monetizing Nazi
loot, including gold teeth, to raise money to fund Jewish refugees. He worked
for decent housing for mentally handicapped and Alzheimer's patients. His life
inspired many to perform their own good deeds.
One Life was released in the US on March 15,
2024. It is an almost two-hour long biopic directed by James Hawes, best known
for his work in TV, with a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake. It stars
Anthony Hopkins as old Nicholas Winton and Johnny Flynn as young Winton. One
Life has a 90% professional and 94% fan score at Rotten Tomatoes. Internet
Movie Database fan reviewers are less enthusiastic, awarding the film 7.6 stars
out of a possible 10. Recent fan reviews laud the film for bringing to light
the efforts of a lesser known hero, but also mention that the film is not
particularly gripping, innovative, or deep. "Incredible story;
underwhelming delivery," reads one review. Another, "an incredible
story made into an average film." And another, "disappointing
montage."
One Life switches back and forth between the life
of the elderly Nicholas Winton. He is an old man trying to neaten up his house.
His wife (Lena Olin) wants some of his paraphernalia gone. He, silently, walks
about the house gathering up items. He empties out his swimming pool and burns
some of his items. In intercut scenes, Johnny Flynn, as the younger Nicholas
Winton, travels to Prague and sees poor refugees living in tents during a harsh
winter. One Life ends with a reenactment of the famous 1988 reunion on That's
Life. The real reunion is viewable on YouTube.
One Life struck this viewer as a paint-by-numbers
TV movie. I didn't hate it, and I'm glad I saw it because it introduced me to a
hero I'd never previously heard of.
Anthony Hopkins didn't work for me as
Nicholas Winton. Now that I've watched several interviews with the real Winton
across several years of his long life, I like Hopkins' performance even less.
The real Winton was a very charming man with a perpetual twinkle in his eye and
a lot of oomph. His Jewish ancestry is apparent in his features. As he aged he
looked more and more like Henry Kissinger.
Forty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Johnny
Flynn is miscast as Nicholas Winton. Flynn previously brought his
too-cool-for-school acting style to an impersonation of David Bowie in Stardust.
The Flynn I saw in the One Life got lost in every scene. He wasn't
the focus of my attention. I wasn't interested in this opaque figure walking
around Prague appearing, possibly, sad, but certainly not capable of historic
heroism.
Lena Olin, a veteran, multiple-award-winning
actress, is given just about nothing to do as Grete Gjelstrup. Helena Bonham
Carter, at 57, is still a great beauty. She plays Winton's mother, Babi. Babi
is imperious, she speaks with a German accent, and she wears a fur coat. Babi
approaches a British bureaucrat. The bureaucrat turns down her request. Here
Babi is that tried-and-true movie cliché, the spunky female who bests the heartless
bureaucrat. Babi speaks forcefully to the bureaucrat about the plight of the
refugee children. He relents. We've seen scenes like this many times. I wish
the movie had refurbished this cliché.
The one performer in the film who made
me sit up and take notice was Romola Garai as Doreen Warriner. She struck me as
the one person in the cast who seemed to realize that the Nazis were
approaching and that urgent action needed to be taken, fast.
One Life's scenes of refugee suffering appear to
have been shot on a very tight budget. We get some people in ragged clothing on
a Prague street, not a sense of hundreds of thousands of people shivering in
the cold.
Depicting the refugees as uniformly poor
distorted an important historical reality. "In the 1930s, Czechoslovakia ranked as a major European
industrial country, enjoying a strong tradition of craftsmen skilled in
producing machinery and other manufactures and of businessmen adept in
exporting these goods."
Czech refugees didn't start out as
ragged, flea-bitten tent dwellers begging for food. Czech Jews were often urban
and white collar. They were integrated members of their society. They wore
fashionable clothing and were multilingual. Czech Jews were more likely than
other Eastern European Jews to be secularized, without strong religious
observance, and to be assimilated. Czech and Moravian Jews had the highest rate
of intermarriage in Europe. George Kennan said, "The Czech intelligentsia,
and the wealthy landowning society, are very extensively bound up with Jewish
society through intermarriage" (see here).
There are many archival photos of these
refugees on the web. You see kids in cute sailor suits and women in fur coats.
These people, people like us, people who had clean and comfortable homes,
people who were their neighbors' doctors, professors, employers, and
accountants, suddenly found themselves dispossessed, unwanted, homeless,
abandoned to one of the most monstrous human beings and ideologies in all of
human history.
Well-to-do people are not better than
poor people. But "the poor you will always have with you" and we are
used to the problems of poverty. Czech Jewish refugees' plight is more
shocking, and perhaps something that modern Americans can relate to more easily.
People who had achieved much in life, who were accepted and important members
of society, found themselves, in a very short period of time, the target of and
abandoned to genocidal hatred. If it happened to people like them, it could
happen to people like us.
I want movies like One Life, that
celebrate heroes, to be made, and I want people to pay for tickets to see them,
so that more will be made. I'm glad I paid for my ticket. But One Life was
not the movie I wanted.
I found the movie I wanted when I
watched a 2011 Czech and Slovak, English language docudrama, Nicky's Family.
It's streaming now on Amazon and other sites. Nicky's Family was
directed by Matej Minac and written by Minac and Patrik Pass. An IMDB review
states, "I think I cried through most of the movie." I didn't write
that review, but the reviewer speaks for me. Nicky's Family did
everything for me that One Life did not do: it combined compelling
imagery with emotional heft and a thorough, detailed, historical background. It
also brought the Winton story up to 2011.
Canadian journalist Joe Schlesinger is
the film's debonair host. Silver fox Schlesinger exudes all the charisma and
enthusiasm of the classic film star, Cary Grant. Schlesinger is in his vibrant
eighties in the film. He grew up in Bratislava and was one of the children
rescued by Nicholas Winton. Schlesinger guides the viewer through Nicky's
Family's various modes of presentation. The film includes archival footage
of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, the Nazi invasion, and the actual children
rescued by Winton. There are well-produced dramatizations of key scenes. These
dramatizations are so well done that at times I had to strain to differentiate
between archival footage and reenactments. Nicky's Family also includes
lively and detailed interviews with other Jews Winton saved, and with Winton
himself. These reminiscences are alternately heart-warming, heart-breaking, and
laugh-out-loud funny. Final scenes show survivors with their own grandchildren;
these scenes emphasize that Winton didn't just make the lives of the kids he
saved possible; he also made possible these many grandchildren.
One aspect of Nicky's Family was
particularly sobering. I have read many memoirs of Jews who grew up in pre-war
Poland and Czechoslovakia. Contrary to what one might expect, these memoirs
describe pleasant, and even idyllic childhoods.
Yes antisemitism reached a fever pitch
in the interwar West, from the US to Poland. But in many memoirs, the rise in
antisemitism is experienced as a distant rumble. Memoirists like Jerzy Kluger
report having Christian friends and comfortable lives. Memoirist Leon Weliczker
Wells is one of many who reports that no one could have conceived that Germany,
widely regarded as the most civilized and modern country in the world, could
descend into diabolical evil.
In Nicky's Family, Schlesinger
emphasizes how at home he was in Bratislava as a child. "It was a
pleasant, tolerable, multicultural and multilingual place." He loved going
to cafes with his father and playing chess and drinking hot chocolate with
whipped cream. On meeting a woman, the custom was to say "I kiss your
hand." Schlessinger repeats the phrase, in Czech, Slovak, German, and
Hungarian. Kurt Stern remembers his father winning many prizes in dance
competitions at the famous resort town of Karlovy Vary, aka Carlsbad. "We
had a good life until the Nazis took over."
Malka Sternberg reports that one day a
Nazi officer came to her school. The officer demanded, "Who are the Jewish
children? You sit in the back." After the Nazi left the class, the Czech
headmaster announced, "'From now on, the back seat is the seat of honor.
Only the best children sit there.' That was Czechoslovakia," she
concludes, remembering the best of her natal country.
John Fieldsend, another Winton survivor,
describes an incident from his childhood in Dresden. His father took him to see
a doctor after he cut his head. "That needs stitching, but I don't stitch
Jews," the doctor said.
One man, Adolf Hitler, changed the world
for millions of people. It is sobering to contemplate the horrible changes that
can occur because of one bad man and the many who follow him.
Winton is credited with saving over 669
children. That number is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall death
toll of World War II. Those saved by Winton had every reason to be resentful,
enraged, and bitter, to want to seek revenge. Their entire families and their
entire extended community were wiped out. In Nicky's Family, a survivor
remembers. Her mother gave her clothes for the trip to England. She gave her
daughter not only dresses that would fit her in 1938, but also for years into
the future. Both this mother and daughter knew that the mother would not
survive, and they would never met again.
After the war, a former member of the
Sonderkommando informed Hanus Weber of the ultimate fate of his mother,
brother, and ten other children. This former concentration camp prisoner,
assigned by the Nazis to handling mass extermination, told Weber's mother and the
eleven children in her care to sing. They would thereby inhale more gas and
their end would come quickly. The adults in Nicky's Family had every
reason to surrender to despair.
Nicky's Family reveals the path these survivors chose. They
focused on the positive. One child's father, in his last words to her, told her
to be brave and cheerful. Schlesinger's father, in a final letter, told him not
to forget the precepts he was taught at home; he prayed that the Almighty would
allow his son to grow into a just and decent man.
The refugees are genuinely grateful to
those who showed them kindness. Kurt Stern was sent, in England, to live with a
Methodist farm family. They had a thatched roof, no electricity, and an
outhouse, all very shocking to Stern, who had been used to childhood outings to
Karlovy Vary. He feared that the thatch roof would fall on him. But, "They
were good to us. They were real Christians in the true sense of the word."
Hugo Marom is grateful to an English taxi driver, who lived in a one-room
apartment with his wife and child, who put up five refugee boys and bought them
fish and chips. "The poorer people were, the kinder they were," he
reports. Vera Gissing says that when she met her adoptive mother, the woman
spoke four words to her in English, words that Vera did not understand. She
discovered later that her foster mother was assuring her, "You shall be
loved."
Many of these refugees, in spite of
their agonizing history, became model citizens, and contributed to the
countries that took them in. This was encouraged. Tom Berman reports that the
children were taken on educational trips. "We went to old age homes and
learned that we are not the center of the universe. There are other people out
there who have problems and needs and maybe you can do something about it."
Do something about it they did. Benjamin
Abeles became an award-winning physicist whose contributions helped make space
exploration possible. Vera Gissing became a published author. Eva Hayman became a nurse. "Coming to England
made me grateful for life, but also guilty for being alive. Here I was alive,
and my parents were dead. I didn't suffer, and they had suffered ... On the
other hand, whether I wanted it or not, as a nurse I had a tool to help other
people with a different kind of suffering. So I thought maybe there is a reason
why I survived." Renata Laxova became a pediatrician who
made important medical discoveries. Hugo Marom was one of the founders of the
Israeli Air Force. Nicky's Family closes with accounts of people from
various countries, inspired by Winton, who have done good deeds.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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