One Life
You may have seen the viral video. He’s an old British man called Nicholas Winton sitting in the front row of a TV studio watching “That’s Life.” The presenter tells the viewers that 40 years earlier, just before World War II broke out and while the Nazis were overrunning Czechoslovakia, he saved hundreds of children from Prague. It had never been revealed publicly and none of them knew who had organized their transport and found them foster homes in the UK. Then she introduced the woman sitting next to him. And in a second “That’s Life” episode, where he expected to meet two more of these now-grown children he’d rescued, it turned out every member of the studio audience was one.
The amazing story is now told in rather less amazing but still affecting film “One Life,” so named for its theme which is very much Hopkins’ wheelhouse that any single person can change everything. In his 80s Winton is played by Anthony Hopkins; Johnny Flynn has his younger years in flashbacks to late 1930s London.
Winton was born two years after his German parents emigrated to England in 1907, they changed their name from Wertheim as WWI loomed because they wanted to be thought of as entirely British. They were Jewish converts and Winton was baptized, though as an agnostic who tells a Czech rabbi suspicious of his motives for seeking names of displaced children, he thinks about such things more than most stockbrokers do socialist theories.
“Everyone in Prague’s trying to get out,” says Winton’s mother (Helena Bonham Carter) dryly. “My son is trying to get in.” Germany has just “annexed” the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and only European politicians think he’ll stop there. Refugees are living almost literally on top of each other in Prague, where the Kindertransport trains that rescue refugee children can only come from Germany and Austria not Czechoslovakia.
A few tired Britons in Prague were trying to help, but they were focused on activists who would be arrested first if the Nazis showed up. Winton was focused on the children. There were thousands of children and countless barriers. Locals and refugees wouldn’t share their information for fear that the Nazis would find them out either by force or betrayal. In the U.K. there was a lot of bureaucratic red tape, and in every country between Czechoslovakia and Great Britain £50 (about $10,000 today) and a willing foster home were required before each child could enter. And there was no time. With some convincing from his very persuasive mother, some friends in the U.K. and Prague, and endless hours sticking photographs of the children onto visas, they managed to get eight trains filled with more than 600 children to England. The ninth train, scheduled to leave the day the war was declared, was stopped by the Nazis.
Now that he is older and at his wife’s insistence has started going through the towering piles of paper in his home office again, he thinks about his life as it went beyond him. He is consumed with thoughts about all those kids he couldn’t save; shyly brings his scrapbook of Operation Kindertransport to his local newspaper only to have an editor tell him there’s no local angle, then brings it to Betsy Maxwell (Marthe Keller), French wife of media mogul/financier/Czech refugee/massive fraudster Robert Maxwell (and Ghislaine Maxwell’s parents, but that’s another movie). Finally someone recognizes it.
The flashback scenes are not as engaging as they’d like to be, we’re more compelled by Hopkins scenes not just because we look forward that TV reveal re enactment but because film is wiser about purpose/meaning than it is about difficulties in rescuing kids. His pool-as-metaphor (immersion, draining when leaves fall in and bury the filter, fill it up again) is unnecessarily heavy handed, it’s when Winton sees his saved children grown-up now, apparently thriving that things begin to make sense for him and everything we need.
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