My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports

In the blasting force of the Holocaust film industry I had worried that Melissa Hacker's touching film might be lost. I had the pleasure of seeing the film in a university theatre and spending some time with its director, and I'm very happy to see it available on video, where its intimacy should do well. This is a family story--Hacker's own mother, who appears in the film, was one of the children transported out of Nazi Germany--and what is most satisfying about it is its close attention to individual lives. And those lives turn out to be deeply illuminating, not least because the stories retain their childlike confusion at the insanity of the adult world. The idea that children should leave the families they loved and take up with new families who didn't even speak German was always somewhat incomprehensible to the Kindertransport emigrants--properly so-- and through their own bewilderment and their permanently mixed feelings of relief, gratefulness, sorrow and guilt we catch some glimpse of the incomprehensibility of the Nazi persecution itself. Because Hacker's touch is so light the weight of the film's message is all the more bearable; and it loses none of its depth by her sensitive treatment.