Then and Now, Young Lives in Pain

Our eyes see children now.

On television and in newspapers we see pictures of those whose parents died on Sept. 11. In Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, we see bodies of children; in Afghanistan, children who are ragtag soldiers and refugees, who have known only war and poverty, and many who have been oppressed their entire lives because of being girls.

What do children see?

A bit of that comes through powerfully this week in two fine documentaries from the heart that should not be missed, each sharing the suffering and resilience of children from vastly different perspectives and generations.

“I could still blow up,” says a young Jerusalem Israeli with a buzz-cut riding a bus with his twin brother in “Promises,” Thursday’s “P.O.V.” program on PBS. “The Jews kicked us off our land and put us in this camp,” says Sanabel, an 11-year-old Palestinian girl speaking from the Deheishe refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

Same old story of Israelis and Palestinians in conflict? Not here.

But first on HBO tonight comes “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport,” the two-hour film from Deborah Oppenheimer and Mark Jonathan Harris that earned a documentary Oscar this year.

These are mostly the voices of elderly Jews recalling their deliverance as children from the abyss of Nazism just prior to World War II, when parents who brought them into the world granted them the gift of survival by turning them over to strangers for a life of relative security in Great Britain. One of the rescued was Oppenheimer’s mother.

More than 10,000 were allowed to leave because Germany’s policy on Jews in 1938--soon to change for the worst--was forced immigration. They had a place to go because of the British Parliament’s new Kindertransport policy welcoming refugees up to age 17, in contrast to rejection by the U.S. Congress, one rationale being that accepting kids without parents was “contrary to the laws of God.”

The British became their saviors. “Out of the blue, I was told I had a chance to come to England--how lucky could I be?” recalls Lorraine Allard. Separation from their families would be difficult, but only temporary, just until this trouble blew over, children were assured.

So off they went, identifying numbers hanging from their necks, departing for British foster homes and hostels from train stations where in less than two years many of their parents and other loved ones would leave in a different direction, for Hitler’s death camps.

Supported by archival footage, these mini-memoirs are deeply moving, some wrenching and darkly ironic, as in Lory Cahn telling of being pulled off a departing Kindertransport train through a window by her father because he couldn’t bear to give her up. His act of love was costly, for she would spend her youth in eight concentration camps and weigh only 58 pounds when finally liberated.

Not that childhood in Great Britain was lollipops and taffy pulls for all of these young refugees. Also here are touching letters from homesick children to families back home, and memories of bad experiences with foster parents and other problems.

But they lived.

Meanwhile, just as “Into the Arms of Strangers” recalls Jews under the thumb of ruthless Nazis, so do the young Jews of “Promises” speak of being targeted by Arabs, and the film’s Arab children speak of being victimized by Jews.

“Authentic Jews,” that is--meaning Israelis, not other Jews, an 11-year-old Palestinian named Mahmoud makes clear in Jerusalem’s Old City, where he lives.

Most of this documentary from B.Z. Goldberg, Justine Shapiro and Carlos Bolado was shot in 1997-98, a period of relative calm separating the first intifada from the ever-explosive present one now scorching any prospects for peace between the two sides.

Although your first impression may be of a film being overtaken by events in 2001, there’s a timelessness to its glints of hope. And also its raw anger that lingers like a throbbing ache in a region where Israelis increasingly see Palestinian children as future bombers and Palestinians see Israeli children as future bullets.

Boston-born Goldberg, who grew up in Israel, is narrator and reporter, driving back and forth across an Israeli checkpoint to visit four Jewish and three Palestinian children. The same checkpoint is crossed by little Sanabel, a gorgeous child with expressive dark eyes, when she and her family visit her father, described by Goldberg as a Palestinian journalist and foe of the peace process who then had been imprisoned two years by the Israelis without being tried or even formally charged. He’s now free.

When Sanabel reads a letter from him in the film, she cries, her sad tears surely as genuine as those of Jewish children severed from their parents in the days of the Kindertransport.

And as true as the feelings of Moishe, the 10-year-old resident of the Israeli Beit El settlement who mourns the deaths of a young friend and his mother who were ambushed in their car and murdered by Palestinian terrorists. “If I could make my own future, all the Arabs would fly away,” he says.

There’s dark humor here hinting at divisions between Israel’s religious and secular communities when Israeli twins Yarko and Daniel recoil at religious Jews and one tells Goldberg he’d “rather visit an Arab village” than be among them.

Wider divides surface elsewhere. Although living only short distances apart, these Arab and Jewish children are separated by a Dead Sea of mistrust, their opinions shaped largely by what they have been taught and the cruelty and violence around them.

Even terrorists were children once, potential doves of peace becoming hawks after being radicalized at some point in their lives. That comes to mind when hearing the sweet-faced, prepubescent Mahmoud endorse the terrorism of Hamas and Hezbollah. “They kill women and children, but they do it for their country,” he says. “The more Jews we kill, the fewer there will be, until they’re almost gone.”

An impasse? Late in the documentary, something optimistic happens that transcends politics and ethnicity, an act of camaraderie and surge of emotion so stunning and powerful that it shouldn’t be revealed.

Yet that was then and this is now, when violence between Israelis and Palestinians has flamed into an inferno. Even though “Promises” adds a coda updating these kids as teenagers in 2000--and Shapiro reports that all are in good health today--you think about them attempting to survive this Hades, knowing more dreams will be lost.

And lives lost.

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“Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport” airs tonight at 8 on HBO. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children). P.O.V.’s “Promises” airs Thursday at 9 p.m. on KCET. The network has rated it TV-PG-LV (may be unsuitable for young children, with special advisories for coarse language and violence).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.