From the Director, Winter 2024
The new film, One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins as Sir Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker who saved 669 Jewish children while on holiday in Czechoslovakia in 1939 is getting great reviews and following its US release on March 15, has been widely viewed.[1]
For many, this will be their first encounter with the story of Nicholas Winton. For the Voice/Vision Archive, Nicholas Winton is an old acquaintance, though we never met in person.
In 2005, the archive was approached by the Gelman Education Foundation to screen the documentary, The Power of Good. The film, directed by Matej Mináč, chronicled the then somewhat hidden life of Winton, who, with the outbreak of the war in September 1939, returned to England, joined the Royal Air Force, married, raised a family and never talked about what he had done in Prague. It was only later, with the discovery of some old notebooks by Winton’s wife Grete, that the story came to light.
How or why we were chosen to screen the film was never made clear to me, but I remember that Sid Bolkosky, founder and director of Voice/Vision seemed hesitant to align the positive message of the film with the mission of the archive. Sid always seemed hesitant to look for positive messages from the Holocaust, especially when they seemed staged or contrived. I think, however that the film changed his mind, at least a little. Unlike the motivations of Oskar Schindler, whose rescue of 1200 Jews in Krakow were often morally questionable, at least at first, Winton’s actions stemmed from a genuinely altruistic impulse combined with one part English phlegm along with several parts’ pragmatic realism, summed up best by Winton, “There is nothing that can’t be done if it’s fundamentally reasonable.”
Thanks to a generous donation from the Gelman Foundation, Sid traveled to Israel in 2008 and interviewed 11 of the children saved by Winton and those interviews, along with two previously conducted ones are available on the archive’s website.
I’ve worked with the Voice/Vision interviews for almost 24 years now and have taught about the Holocaust for almost as long. Although I still share Sid’s hesitation about contrived “feel good” stories and the Holocaust, Winton’s story isn’t one of these, it stands rather as a testament to the power of true altruism and what it can accomplish.
—————————————————————————— [1]Walsh, Katie. “Review: In ‘One Life,’ a Holocaust Hero’s Story Gets the Modest Treatment He Would Have Preferred.” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024-03-15/one-life-review-anthony-hopkins-johnny-flynn-nicholas-winton.