By the time he died in 2015 at the age of 106, Nicholas Winton was the nearest British equivalent to a secular saint.
His basic story has been told many times. In late 1938, everyone in Prague was braced for an imminent German invasion. When a friend asked Winton to come and witness the developing humanitarian crisis for himself, he set about organising a series of eight Kindertransports, which eventually brought 669 Czech Jewish children to safety in Britain.
Though he said little about the rescue for almost half a century, he was eventually “outed” on Esther Rantzen’s television show, That’s Life! in 1988. At one celebrated moment, he was startled to find himself surrounded by a large audience of people who all owed their lives to him.
Since my father was one of Winton’s “children”, my two brothers and I, and now our five children and three grandchildren, would also not be here without him. So I had high hopes for James Hawes’ new biopic, One Life, and was delighted to be invited to the premiere. It is a great pity that the result is so soft-centred.
Much of the problem is that the film is based on a rather slight memoir, If It’s Not Impossible …, by Winton’s daughter Barbara (who also served as an executive producer until she died). It reconstructs the rescue itself touchingly enough and shatters some common myths. Contrary to the comforting idea that the Kindertransports were a shining example of British decency in welcoming persecuted refugees, we get to see how hard it was for Winton to charm or bully the immigration authorities into speedily granting visas, and to find foster families and sponsors willing to provide £50 for each child to ensure they would not be a burden on the public purse. It also makes clear that Winton was not a one-man band but ably supported by people such as Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick who ran the Czech end of the operation and faced far greater physical danger.
Yet the gripping events of the late 1930s are interspersed with scenes of the grumpy, ageing Winton (brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins) fretting about burgeoning mountains of paperwork and, in particular, what he should do with a scrapbook he had kept from the time with pictures of all the Kindertransportees. This remarkable document eventually comes to the attention of Elisabeth Maxwell, wife of the newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, who facilitated an article in the Sunday Mirror and Winton’s subsequent appearances on That’s Life! His moment in the showbiz spotlight forms the climax of One Life.
My father, himself a well-known film director (Karel Reisz), refused to take part in the programmes, fearing they would be schmaltzy and manipulative (and was subjected to a good deal of emotional blackmail by the producers to get him to change his mind). Having now seen them re-created on screen, I can see his point.
What the new film doesn’t explore is how Elisabeth Maxwell also organised a Holocaust conference called Remembering for the Future, later in 1988. This included a semi-private event where Winton got a chance to meet Kindertransportees and their close families on a much more informal basis. It proved an extraordinarily memorable occasion and a turning point in my own rather difficult relationship with my father, who found a way to talk about his painful past for the first time.
The former child refugees were obviously delighted to get a chance to thank Winton in person, express their joy at being alive and their pride in what they had managed to achieve in their personal and professional lives. Yet many were still visibly traumatised, regressing from successful middle-aged professionals into frightened children in front of my eyes. Others recalled poignant episodes from the train journeys across Europe, such as the moment when they crossed the Dutch border into safe territory and were welcomed with mugs of hot chocolate. Genuine celebration was tempered by a strong sense of what had been lost when they left families behind in Czechoslovakia. It was, in other words, an event which caught the real emotional complexity of the Kindertransport, rather than the kind of cheesy uplift offered by That’s Life! and now the biopic. It seems strange for a film on this theme to focus so entirely on Winton and to be so incurious about the later lives of the rescued children.
The ending also fails to catch what was genuinely inspiring about Winton. He seems to have been a rare example of an English stereotype familiar from past-war cinema: no-nonsense, practical, emotionally restrained but fundamentally decent. Operating under immense pressures of time and resources, he was totally focused on saving as many children as possible, even if it meant bending the rules. He was also strikingly unsentimental, treating the whole operation a bit like a business and telling one interviewer, “I was only interested in getting the children to England and I didn’t mind a damn what happened to them afterwards, because the worst that would happen to them in England was better than being in the fire.”
Winton, in other words, was the least showbizzy person imaginable, uninterested in facile emoting and virtue-signalling. At the One Life premiere, as on That’s Life!, the organisers asked people in the audience to stand up if they owed their existence to Nicholas Winton. And, yes, it was hard not to be moved. But it also captured something very uncomfortable about making a feelgood film about someone whose life should not just give us a warm glow but challenge us to reflect on how we, too, might make a difference.
