A Voyage to a New Life

In the year leading up to World War II, Jews desperate to leave Nazi-dominated Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia found the world’s doors of refuge closed--except for one small chink. Great Britain, in a singular gesture, agreed in late 1938 to accept some 10,000 refugee children between the ages of 2 and 17. The deal was a harsh one: No one 18 or older, including the children’s parents, would be admitted.

The little-remembered chapter of rescue and heartbreak was known as the Kindertransport, or Children’s Transport. Some 60 years later, this episode has been saved from near oblivion in the documentary “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.” The Warner Bros. film opens Friday in Los Angeles, New York and three other cities.

Veteran TV producer Deborah Oppenheimer (“The Drew Carey Show,” “Norm”) had a compelling reason for embarking on the project almost six years ago. Her mother, born Sylva Avramovici, had just turned 11 when her parents put her on a train from Germany to England, with tearful assurances that the family would soon be reunited. Sylva never saw her parents again, nor did some 90% of the other evacuated children.

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Growing up on Long Island, Oppenheimer learned early on not to ask about her mother’s childhood. “I tried to bring up the subject and my mother would cry, then I would cry, and then I withdrew for fear of opening up this vast hurt,” says Oppenheimer. “My mother died in late 1993, and as one way of dealing with my grief, I decided to find out all I could about her childhood roots, now that the earlier restraints about hurting her had been lifted.”

Oppenheimer soon became convinced that her search for her mother’s childhood and the story of the Kindertransport were beschert, a Yiddish expression implying something that was fated to happen. The first such happening was her father’s discovery in a drawer of an unknown cache of letters that her mother’s parents wrote daily to their daughter until they were deported to concentration camps. A second occurred in 1995 at a dinner honoring a Los Angeles philanthropist. The program included a four-minute film clip on the Kindertransport, after which the dinner chairman asked all who had been part of the experience to rise.

Three tables full of gray-haired men and women stood up. “They live, they talk to each other,” exulted Oppenheimer. “It was as if the heavens had opened up.”

One contact led to another, including the discovery of two women who had known and lived with Sylva Avramovici in England during the war. Then followed months of digging into old letters and diaries and phone calls to the main centers of surviving Kindertransporters in England, Israel and New York. Some 70 “alumni” live in Southern California and 30 in Northern California, according to Eddie Nussbaum, president of the regional Kindertransport Assn.

Once contacted, most of the “Kinder,” as they are identified in the film, were cooperative, though at the beginning they frequently displayed a puzzling hesitancy. “There was a sense among them that they had suffered so little compared to those who had perished in or survived concentration camps that it wasn’t appropriate to talk about their own experiences,” observes Oppenheimer.

Pieces Falling Into Place

In the summer of 1998, another piece fell into place when Oppenheimer viewed a screening of “The Long Way Home,” which won an Oscar for best documentary feature the previous year. The film depicted the torturous road taken by concentration camp survivors and displaced persons to reach Palestine (later Israel) between 1945 and 1948, and was written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris. The veteran filmmaker and USC cinema professor was initially reluctant to commit to the project as writer and director.

“I had done two films on the postwar Jewish experience recently and suffered from a kind of Holocaust exhaustion,” he says. “I knew little about the Kindertransport, but once I looked into it, I realized it wouldn’t be a Holocaust film. It really touches on the universal themes of parents and children, their separation and memories and, above all, the amazing resiliency of children.”

Harris, too, brought certain family remembrances to the project. “My grandfather came by himself from Hungary to the United States when he was 12 years old,” he says. “I’ve always wondered how he coped, what his life was like alone at that age.” Harris signed on and brought with him two other colleagues from “The Long Way Home,” editor Kate Amend and director of photography Don Lenzer.

At this point, Oppenheimer and Harris faced the reality that their window of opportunity for making the film was constantly narrowing. Most of the former evacuees were now in their late 60s and 70s, and the attrition rate is high. The producer and director were also searching intently for someone who had been involved as an adult in the Kindertransport, to balance the film’s primary viewpoint of the children. They discovered 85-year-old Norbert Wollheim, who had been one of the chief Kindertransport organizers on the German end of the line, but were warned that he was quite ill. Wollheim became the project’s first on-camera interview and in the film appears healthy and energetic. Five weeks after the interview he died.

During the summer of 1999, when the Kindertransport Assn. met for its 60-year reunion, the filming of “Strangers” began in earnest. After winnowing some 300 contacts, 23 were selected for in-depth interviews, of whom 16 appear in the completed 117-minute documentary.

Even after the passage of so many decades, during which the onetime Kinder established careers, founded families and became grandparents, the anguish and dislocation of their childhoods can still throb like fresh scars. Lory Cahn, at 14, was set to leave on a Kindertransport from Breslau in 1939. The train pulled out and her father, a disabled war veteran unable to bear the separation from his daughter, pulled Lory through the window of the slowly moving train and onto the platform. Lory later survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Her parents didn’t.

Hedy Epstein couldn’t fathom why her parents wanted to send her to England. “A few days before I was to leave, I accused my parents of trying to get rid of me,” she recalls. “I said, ‘I’m really a gypsy child . . . and now you no longer want me.’ ” There are humorous incidents, though rare. Wollheim recalls a small boy who carried with him an expensive violin, which, under the terms of the Kindertransport agreement, custom officials were obliged to confiscate. Wollheim asked the official to allow the boy to play a piece of music to prove that he was a serious student. The boy took out the instrument and played “God Save the King”--all three stanzas of the British national anthem. The boy was allowed to keep his violin.

Once admitted into England, the children were strangers in a strange land, where people spoke a strange language, ate strange food and wore strange clothes. Some found loving foster parents, who scrimped to feed an extra mouth; others were exploited as maids. Some were housed in baronial estates, others in freezing holding camps waiting to be adopted at weekly “cattle market” inspections.

In 1940, boys who had reached age 16 were arrested as “enemy aliens” and deported on harrowing voyages to Australia through submarine-infested waters. Most returned to England a year or so later to serve in the British armed forces. “All of them ceased to be children and were forced to become adults,” says Harris. “Whatever their experiences, they realized, or were told if they didn’t, that they had to be grateful for being saved. They could not be angry or express their emotions.”

Whatever hidden scars inflicted by their childhood experiences, practically all the Kinder grew up to lead productive and full lives. Two went on to win Nobel Prizes in the sciences. Sadly, no other country followed England’s humanitarian example. A bill was introduced in Congress in April 1939 to admit 20,000 “German refugee children” into the U.S. The anti-immigration lobby swung into action and one lawmaker argued sanctimoniously that separating children from their parents was against the laws of God. The bill died in committee.

Haunting Songs, an Intriguing Montage

The documentary opens with an intriguing montage of artifacts familiar to any German schoolchild of the late 1930s. There is a quill-like pen for dipping into ink wells, the conical cardboard bag filled with candy and given to 6-year-olds on their first school day, crayons, report cards and books such as “Struwelpeter.” (As a Berlin schoolboy of that era, I can vouch for the complete authenticity of the display.) Equally authentic and haunting are the songs that every German schoolchild, past or present, learns at his mother’s knee, from “If I Were a Little Bird” to “Little Hanschen Went Alone Into the Wide World.”

Oppenheimer started working at Lorimar in 1981 and continued after the company merged with Warner. She can recall only two instances--”Quincy Jones” and “Roger & Me”--in which the studio either financed or released a documentary. In the case of “Strangers,” she credits top executives at the studio and at Time Warner “who felt they had a responsibility as a company to contribute to a project of this kind.” She declined to give a dollar figure for the cost of the documentary but said it was tiny compared to the budget for current theatrical films.

Oppenheimer says she had no problem balancing her intense involvement with “Strangers” with continuing production of the “Drew Carey” and “Norm” sitcoms and planning for two more upcoming shows.

“I was warned by Holocaust scholars that you can’t immerse yourself in that material all day, every day,” she says. “Although the film does not deal directly with the Holocaust, I looked at 160 tapes, which included Hitler’s speeches and concentration camp scenes. I was happy when my television shows gave me a break and a chance to laugh.”

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* Accompanying the release of “Into the Arms of Strangers” are a companion book of the same title, written by Harris and Oppenheimer, and an exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The “Kindertransport” exhibit, which runs through Sept. 24, displays artifacts supplied by the onetime evacuees. Included are items shown in the film’s opening montage, as well as toys, clothing and mementos packed into the one small carry-on suitcase each child was allowed to take along on the journey to a new life.