Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport Page #2

Synopsis: For nine months prior to World War II, in an act of mercy unequalled anywhere else before the war, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission, opening its doors to over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These children, or Kinder (sing. Kind), as they came to be known, were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. The majority of them never saw their families again.
Production: Warner Bros. Pictures
  Won 1 Oscar. Another 6 wins & 6 nominations.
 
IMDB:
7.8
Metacritic:
79
Rotten Tomatoes:
91%
PG
Year:
2000
122 min
354 Views


just walk on until I came to this house.

Word got back to my parents that while

on the tram, I was a very talkative boy.

I told them all the bad things

that Herr Hitler was doing.

I thought that "Herr" was his first name,

of course.

And word got back to my parents

that maybe...

...I shouldn't be traveling alone.

And my father then came with me.

He didn't say much, he hardly ever did...

...but he let it be known...

...that it wasn't wise to go around

saying bad things about Hitler.

In the weeks following

the annexation of Austria...

... Nazi authorities had enacted

all the anti-Jewish laws...

... it had taken Hitler five

years to put into place in Germany.

For anyone coming from Vienna,

it was very dramatic.

The reality of it struck me

when my parents talked about...

...giving up the apartment,

that we had to leave.

That was something,

you know, the bottom falls out.

Everything falls out of you.

This is all I knew...

... and we had to give it up,

we had to leave.

That was probably the biggest blow I had.

Just the idea...

...it'll all end the way it is.

My mother was an activist.

She knew something had to be done.

The decision was to go...

... to England to be hired...

... as a domestic, because the English

would take young women...

... who would not interfere

with the labor market.

The plan was:
She would go ahead.

She'd try to get me and my father out.

This is the time when I remember...

... there was no conversation

among the grown-ups...

... except how to get out of Vienna.

It's interesting because we're now asked,

"How come you didn't leave?"

And when I think

of what it meant to leave...

...how impossible it was to leave.

First of all, you had to have a sponsor...

... in the country you were going to.

Someone who would promise you would

not become a burden on the government.

You would have to get a visa

from the state department...

... or the government to be allowed in.

Then you had to get an exit permit

from the Nazis.

All these things had to come together.

And they had a time span

in which they would expire.

You had to collect all these things together

so that they would be ready.

And it usually didn't happen.

The hardest thing

was to find a country to go to.

The countries under discussion were:

Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela...

... Shanghai, Cuba, the Dominican Republic.

I remember going with my father

to the American consulate.

There was a queue around the block...

... up the stairs...

... and around the room.

We are now in the late summer of 1938.

I got to the United States on May 1, 1951.

It was a 13-year...

...quota for us.

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Mark Jonathan Harris

Mark Jonathan Harris (born 1941) is an American documentary filmmaker probably best known for his films Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000) and The Long Way Home (1997). He has directed three documentaries which have gone on to win Oscars, across three different decades. Educated at Harvard, Harris co-produced the short The Redwoods for the Sierra Club with Trevor Greenwood; the short won the 1967 Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. The aforementioned Into The Arms and Long Way Home also landed Academy Awards. Harris started out as a crime reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, and reports that on his first story he went into a police station and had his car stolen from in front of it. The police called him a few weeks later to ask if he had found his car. Harris tried investigative journalism next but quit after realizing he did not like to embarrass people. Harris believes that filmmakers can construct a cinema verite film beforehand by considering repeatable events—that is, by determining which events are likely to recur frequently, and being there to film those events when they do. He tested this theory on a film on the Peace Corps in Colombia, in a small village 50 miles outside Bogotá. The film was not especially positive about the Peace Corps experience; the Peace Corps decided not to use it for recruiting, but to use it for training people who have been in for about a year. Harris has also directed a film on migrant farmworkers and their dismal wages and living conditions;one of the "stars" of his documentary was Luis Valdez, who went on to direct the film La Bamba. Harris' film The Long Way Home deals with the experience of Jewish refugees after World War II. Spike Lee condemned the second half of the film as propaganda for the state of Israel; nonetheless the film won an Oscar in 1997 for Best Documentary. Harris next directed a film less complimentary towards the state, which had been commissioned specifically for the 50th anniversary of Israel. Harris intended the film, A Dream No More, to reflect Israel, "warts and all"; he spent 15 months and nearly $1.5 million U.S. making the film, which went over deadline as he tried to determine final structure for the film. He turned in a final print and had the film flagged the next day; it was never shown. Harris considers this film the second of his "Jewish trilogy". Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, the third part of the trilogy, tells the stories of several people whose parents sent them on the kindertransport to escape the Germans, as well as one woman who was meant to go and did not because her father pulled her off the train. The film won the 2000 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. In 2003, Harris wrote Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. He was nominated for outstanding writing for non-fiction writing for this documentary. As a documentary filmmaker, Harris casts his films carefully, talking to people beforehand and deciding who has an interesting story and who tells it well on camera. He also refuses to start filming immediately, but prefers to talk with the subjects for about an hour beforehand. He is currently the producer of a documentary called "With One Hand Tied", which is based on the book "Black Warriors: The Buffalo Soldiers of World War II".Harris is also the author of various children's books, a side career he stumbled into the mid-1980s: he returned to journalism because he could not find funding for a documentary he wanted to make. After writing an article about a young child, he was contacted by an agent who asked him to write children's literature and has since written several children's books. Harris is currently a professor at the School of Cinematic Arts of the University of Southern California. more…

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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