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The new feature film tells the story of a British stockbroker who helped 669 young people escape from the Nazis in Prague.
In a 1988 episode of the British television show “That’s Life,” British stockbroker Nicholas Winton was invited to sit in the audience when presenter Esther Rantzen dramatically revealed to him that the entire crowd was made up of young Jews, now adults, whom the Holocaust had stored.
This heartbreaking clip periodically goes viral on social media, but now Winton’s story is hitting the biggest screens, in a drama film, “One Life,” where he is played by two-time Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins.
Hopkins was the casting selection for Winton’s daughter, who died during filming, seven years after her father. The film has already generated complaints (and quick criticism) for promotional curtains that did not communicate about the children’s Jewish identity. The full story of the film’s subject matter is even more complex, with connections to Ghislaine Maxwell, a gold ring, the Talmud, and, of course, the tragic saga of European Jewry.
Winton’s role in that saga was hardly assured. Born to German-Jewish parents in London in 1909, Winton (originally “Wertheim”) was baptized into the Anglican Church, and as an adult, never subscribed to any religion.
At 29, he was a stockbroker and making plans to ski in Switzerland with friends when his partner, schoolteacher Martin Blake, called him and told him that the holidays were over and that he was heading to Prague instead.
“I have a very attractive project and I want your help,” Winton recalls telling Blake. “Come as soon as you can. And don’t bother bringing your skis.
Blake worked with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, an organization set up to save Jews and other minority groups attacked by the Nazis in the newly annexed Sudetenland.
But it was the appeal of a Czech Jewish social worker and activist, Marie Schmolka, that ultimately brought Winton into the Czech Kindertransport-inspired project organized by British university lecturer Doreen Warriner. Schmolka, who is not often mentioned in accounts of Winton’s efforts and is not portrayed in the movie, had visited the areas where refugees were concentrated and collected evidence to garner public support, pleading to foreign ambassadors based in Prague and to Jewish agencies abroad, hoping someone would take them in. But Britain would only take unaccompanied children.
For the first three weeks of January 1939, Winton worked primarily in a hotel in Prague, coordinating and collecting applications from parents looking for a home for their children outside Czechoslovakia. He also took pictures of the young men, which he said was more appealing to future families than an undeniable list of names.
Back in Britain, while still working at the stock exchange, Winton, his assistants and his mother raised money, collected or falsified the children’s documents and also placed advertisements in newspapers to find host families.
On March 14, 1939, the day before Nazi Germany invaded the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia, the first of eight trains containing 669 children, mostly Jewish, headed to Britain. A ninth train was scheduled to depart on Sept. 3, but was halted — Germany had invaded Poland two days earlier, officially starting the war, and the borders were closed. None of the approximately 250 children on that train are known to have survived.
Early in the war, he worked for the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in France and England during the bombing of London, and later joined the Royal Air Force pilot training and documented the destruction he sees with his photographs. In the years after the war, he joined the International Organization for Refugees, in order to repatriate goods looted by the Nazis.
His work with the children went unnoticed for decades. Then, in the late 1980s, Winton’s wife Grete Gjelstrup discovered a scrapbook in the attic with the children’s names and photos, as well as letters written by their parents.
“I guess there are a number of things that husbands don’t tell their wives,” Winton told Matej Minac, who has made several films about his story.
Gjelstrup took the book to Holocaust historian Elizabeth Maxwell, wife of media mogul Robert Maxwell (also parents of Ghislos angelesine Maxwell, sentenced to prison for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse ring), who reported on the story by Winton about the rescue of many children. and, finally, “C’est los angeles vie!” where he met some of the young people he saved.
Winton has been nicknamed “the British Schindler” after German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved some 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust. More than 6,000 children and grandchildren from the Czech Kindertransport owe their lives to Nicholas Winton, according to “One Life,” the 2014 eBook newspaper written through his daughter and biographer Barbara Winton, who animated the film. (The e-book was originally called “Yes No Is Impossible. “) Some of his descendants appear as extras in the scene “That’s Life!”.
After greenlighting an adaptation of her book, Barbara Winton made one request of the project: make Hopkins her father.
Barbara Winton gave the filmmakers access to her father’s letters and other archival materials.
He died in September 2022, while “One Life” was still filming.
“One Life” refers to a paraphrased quote from the Mishnah: “Save one life, save the world”, which was inscribed on a gold ring given to Winton in 1988 at a Holocaust convention organized by Elizabeth Maxwell in Oxford at through some of the young people he saved. Winton wore the ring for the rest of his life.
The quote is also referenced in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List” in a scene where, at the end of the war, the Jews Schindler saved give him a gold ring made from their dental fillings inscribed with a nearly identical quote as a parting gift. The real ring, according to Jozef Gross, the jeweler who created it, did not have an inscription.
Controversy erupted in early January when the film’s promotion in the UK failed to mention that most of the threatened young people were Jewish. Instead, some marketers referred to young people as “Central Europeans. “
After social media backlash, IMDb, the Warner Bros. website in the United Kingdom and the British cinema chain Vue, all of their summaries of the film must read “predominantly Jewish. “
The National Portrait Gallery in London, which displayed a series of portraits of young people stored through Winton to accompany the film, also replaced the text of its description.
“Our Gallery’s curatorial team made this update to the website copy to better reflect the identity of the individuals who traveled on the Kindertransport,” a representative from the National Portrait Gallery wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The original copy assumed that this was implicit, given the nature of the digital exhibition, however, following feedback, we felt it was important to clarify this.”
The film also has a Jewish angle: actress Helena Bonham Carter, of Jewish descent, plays Winton’s mother, Babette Wertheim.
“It was in my DNA to play this role because I come from Austrian Jewish heritage,” Bonham Carter told the Jewish News of London. “And on top of that, on both sides, both my grandparents helped a lot of Jewish people with visas to get out of Nazi Europe.”
Bonham Carter called Winton a hero and said the most important element of the film was giving it meaning, “which drove this man, this exceptional man, so modest, to do the most ordinary things,” he said.
Nicholas Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106.
Despite going decades without recognition for his heroism during the war, the later years of his life were filled with honors and awards. Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 for his efforts during the war, and he received the Order of the White Lion, the highest order from the Czech Republic in 2014. He even had a minor planet named after him.
However, he insisted for years that his paintings were not heroic.
“I never in danger,” Winton told a British newspaper in 2011. “I undertook an vital task, yet I carried it out from the protection of my house in Hampstead. ”
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