Into the Arms of Strangers by Mark Jonathan Harris

These now aged children are led gently back to their earliest memories, which are mostly happy ones. This encourages the audience’s emotional participation rather than bludgeoning it with words and images which can only evoke pity. By keeping the horrors mostly off-stage and the interviews with those who escaped them invariably tasteful and non-exploitative, the film rather daringly allows itself to hint that at bottom its subjects have endured a more intense and premature version of what anyone who has ever lost a beloved parent endures.

Their natural if irrational sense of guilt at having been spared makes them humble, and their now rather advanced age tinges their sense of regret about the past with a more universal hue. It thus conveys a real sense of history’s and humanity’s being served, and not the director’s ego or his self-conceit of being “compassionate.”įor it presents us with a collection of eminently presentable people who were not there, who did not see (most of) the horror at first hand, but whose lives were permanently and intimately scarred by it. An immensely moving movie about real-life events, the film seems nevertheless, against the background of the enormity which shadows it, modest and understated. It tells the story of the 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Austria who were allowed to leave Germany and take up an offer of asylum in Britain on the eve of the Second World War-leaving their parents, for the most part, subsequently to die in concentration camps. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and narrated by Dame Judi Dench, manages the trick (as not all Holocaust documentaries do) of conveying strong emotion on the part of its subjects without ever seeming to exploit it or them. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport

Into the Arms of Strangers by Mark Jonathan Harris