Into the Arms of Strangers Stories of the Kindertransport
USA 2000
Reviewed by Stella Bruzzi
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
This film documents the events surrounding the Kindertransport, the transportation of Jewish children out of Germany and its occupied lands to Britain immediately prior to the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Following Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish riot which occurred in Berlin in November 1938, a British cabinet committee decide that Britain can take in unaccompanied Jewish refugee children under the age of 17. The first train leaves Berlin for Britain in December 1938. Soon trains are leaving from Austria and Czechoslovakia. Many of the children sought to save their parents too by trying to find them work or sponsors in Britain, but most failed to bring them over. Few children were reunited with their parents after the war.
Review
Into the Arms of Strangers is a compelling, gruelling documentary about the British government's attempt to provide asylum for refugee Jewish children from Germany and its occupied lands just before World War II. Here director Mark Jonathan Harris (whose previous documentary The Long Way Home investigated the plight of Holocaust survivors) uses archive footage, the compassionate narration of Judi Dench and, most importantly, interviews with survivors to describe what became known as the Kindertransport .
Despite the simplicity and familiarity of this format, Into the Arms of Strangers, in keeping with the tonal complexity of recent, particularly US, film treatments of the Holocaust, is a feel-good tragedy: the film satisfies our primary urge to be affected by the horror of the Nazi atrocities while sustaining the myth that, had we been there, we would have either survived or helped save those who otherwise were killed. A dualism is at work in Into the Arms of Strangers: on the one hand, there is the sentiment expressed by Norbert Wollheim, an organiser of the Kindertransports in Berlin, that "survival is an accident"; on the other, the view of Alexander Gordon who, having been orphaned, sent to England and arrested, survived the torpedoing of the HMT Dunera and reckons he "was meant to survive".
Harris' film is imbued with Gordon's optimistic view rather than the pessimistic idea that survival is a matter of random selection. Predicated on the notion of an identification between the figures on screen and the film's spectators, the recent run of US Holocaust films configure historical realities as survival fantasies, as if giving credence to the superstitious supposition that if we dream of our own deaths we die. Into the Arms of Strangers isn't a fictionalisation as such but it is an idealisation into which we can insert our emotions and our experiences.
Perhaps it's no surprise then that the film is most powerful when focusing on individual testimonies rather than the big historical picture. Despite Harris' claim that he experimented with ways to defamiliarise well-known archive footage, much of the library material here has been seen elsewhere, with the exception of an image of balloons imprinted with swastikas being sold in the street and the newsreel clip showing the interviewee Lore Segal getting off her boat. The film richly evokes the child's-eye view of Nazism and of arriving for the first time in England; Harris also gives us stylised reconstructions of the events many of the children experienced: the terror of hiding from the SS, packing before leaving, receiving letters from their parents. The montage of teddies, shoes, fine clothes and mementos being lovingly pressed into leather suitcases before leaving for Britain conveys with economy and beauty the parents' pain and fear at seeing their sons and daughters go and the children's own lack of historical perspective.
The interviews at the heart of the film are all shot in intense close-up. Towards the end Lore Segal, author of Other People's Children, a novel recounting her experience as a refugee, comments that the events of her life have proved a writer's "gift". This may seem naïve and lacking in recognition of the torment and death suffered by others, but Segal's optimistic observation encapsulates the tone of Harris' documentary. All the stories of the Kindertransport survivors are presented as if they are gifts, each interview a treasure to be treated with reverence. More than anything else, one comes away from Into the Arms of Strangers with a vivid image of these interviewees and the specific terms they use to evoke their experiences: one talks of shedding a "cloak of lead" as her train arrives in Holland, another of losing his capacity to speak German after reaching England. Put into words, such memories convey the essence of their experience as no archive footage or voiceover can.
Credits
- Director
- Mark Jonathan Harris
- Producer
- Deborah Oppenheimer
- Screenplay
- Mark Jonathan Harris
- Director of Photography
- Don Lenzer
- Editor
- Kate Amend
- Music
- Lee Holdridge
- ©Warner Bros.
- Production Companies
- Warner Bros. Pictures presents a Sabine Films production
- This film was produced in cooperation with the United States Holocaust
- Memorial Museum Washington, D.C.
- Line Producer
- Lou Fusaro
- Associate Producers
- Cayce Callaway
- Alicia Dwyer
- Production Controller
- Michael Lewis
- Production Co-ordinators
- Jacqueline Véissid
- London Crew:
- Mona Benjamin
- New York Crew:
- Kevin Nelson
- Location Manager
- London Crew:
- Christian McWilliams
- Archival Researcher
- Corrinne Collett
- Additional Film Research
- Karen Wyatt
- Wolfgang Klaue
- Angela Spindler-Brown
- Margaret Kirby
- LA Crew Additional Cinematography
- Peter Smokler
- Alicia Dwyer
- Motion Photographer
- Ken Rudolph
- Titles/Opticals
- T & T Optical Effects Company
- Music Score Performed by
- Seattlemusic
- Soloists
- Clarinet:
- Laura DeLuca
- Trumpet:
- Charles Butler
- Piano:
- Meade Crane
- Orchestrations
- Lee Holdridge
- Ira Hearshen
- James Sale
- Music Editor
- Stan Jones
- Music Score Recordist/Mixer
- John Richards
- Soundtrack
- "Alle Vögel sind schon da", "Hänschen klein ging allein", "Und in dem Schneegebirge", "Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär", "Woll'n heimgehn" - Kinderchor des NDR; "Als unser Mops ein Möpschen war" - the Vienna Boys' Choir with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra; "Nevideli jste tu mé panenky", "Kycera Kycera" -Bambini di Praga; "Rule Britannia"
- Sound Design
- Gary Rydstrom
- Sound Mixers
- Peter Miller
- Cologne Crew:
- Caroline Goldie
- Re-recording Mixer
- Gary Rydstrom
- Dialogue Editor
- Teri E. Dorman
- Sound Effects Editor
- Shannon Mills
- Additional Voices
- Mirka Colman
- Alexander Leeb
- Mia Martin
- Kevin Schwarzwald
- Benjamin Singer
- Giulia Tassius
- Emilia von Spreti
- Lavinia von Spreti
- Petra Schwarzwald
- Judi Dench
- narrator
- Certificate
- PG
- Distributor
- Warner Bros Distributors (UK)
- 10,549 feet
- 117 minutes 13 seconds
- Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS
- Colour by
- FotoKem Film & Video