In
1938, twenty-nine-year-old British stockbroker Nicholas
Winton (played by Rupert Graves) began to organize an effort
to have British families adopt Jewish children in Czechoslovakia
as a part of what was called the kindertransport,
which involved a total of some 10,000 children from Austria
as well as Germany. Not all the "endangered children" were
hustled out of Czechoslovakia by train to England, but
669 were. All My Loved Ones (Vsichni moji blízcí),
dedicated to Winton, is about one such adoptee, David Silberstein
(played by Brano Holicek), who provides occasional voiceovers
during the film. Most of the movie, however, focuses on
family life of the Jewish community in Prague before David's
departure. Similar to the Redlichs in Nowhere
in Africa, most of the Silbersteins do not
practice Judaism and consider themselves Czech. Unprepared
for the horrors to come, none of the rest of the family
survives the Holocaust. Through newsreels, the film features
the 1938 Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia, Germany's occupation
of the Sudetenland, and the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia.
Personal tragedies unfold because of the larger political
situation. At the beginning of the film, in the year 1938,
a landlord (played by Jirí Menzel) sells the estate
where the Silbersteins are living to physician Dr. Jakob
Silberstein (played by Josef Abrhám) for peanuts,
yet the family does not get the hint that all Jews should
leave. Jakob's brother Samuel, an accomplished violinist
(played by Jiri Bartoska) wants to marry a non-Jewish woman;
his rabbi brother Leo (played by Krzysztof Kolberger) is
not happy about the prospect of outmarriage but consents,
only to have the Gentile father veto the marriage because
the news tells him that the wife of a Jew almost certainly
would be rounded up by the Nazis and die. Samuel, whose
concerts were canceled by the Nazis, naïvely rejects
the explanation and commits suicide. Jakob arranges to
have his son David go on the kindertransport,
and he also pays a friend $10,000 Czech dollars to arrange
a passport for himself and his wife Irma (played by Libuse
Safránková), but the friend absconds from
the country with the money. Robert (played by Andrzej Deskur),
fiancé of the Silberstein's daughter Hedvika (played
by Tereza Brodská), takes off for Palestine, another
option foolishly rejected by the others, who see the soil
there as a desert. Young David, meanwhile, has a sweetheart,
Sosa (played by Lucia Culkova); the ten-year-olds even
have a mock secret two-person wedding one day. David therefore
counts on escaping to England on the same train with her.
Unfortunately, Sosa is booked on a later train, scheduled
to depart September 1, 1939, but alas that train did not
leave, as Britain declared war on Germany after the invasion
of Poland on that day. The film is directed by Metej Minac,
who is the son of a child who was on the kindertransport and
is based on his mother's recollections. In 1998, when Winton
was ninety-two years old, President Vaclav Havel honored
him with a high award. Videos of a 1998 reunion involving
Winton and some of the surviving children bookend the film,
an event for which Winton, who kept his role a secret for
many years, forgot to bring along a handkerchief; he did
not realize that he would need to dry his eyes. We await
a similar feature film about Operation Babylift, in which
over 2,000 out of an estimated 70,000 Vietnamese young
orphans were flown on several flights to adopting families
in Australia, the United States, and other countries from
April 3, 1975, under a similar pretext. Meanwhile, the
Political Film Society has nominated All My
Loved Ones for best exposé of 2003.
MH
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