Books vs. Movies

Another 2am post. It's not that I'm so prolific, it's just that I can't sleep and my mind twirls and twirls so I might as well put it on paper.

Tonight we watched "Into the Arms of Strangers" - a documentary derived from the book of the same name.

It was hard enough reading these people's stories - but watching them being interviewed as they told them, watching them still trying to be the "brave, good, child" - watching them "being English" and stiff upper lipped as they struggled with their pain and loss, 50 years or more ago, was very emotional, for me.

It was the men, more than the women who got to me. Men of that generation were not expected to be, nor allowed to be emotional but at the end, one of those big, sturdy looking men said that he and 3 of his friends had decided that if "anything like this should ever happen again, they would die with their children with them and not send them away" - said with tears welling up and threatening his dignity. All those years and still the pain of the "abandonment"
was evident. He said that he and his friends said they would take in each other's children - but never send them away.

Another man who had suffered, it seemed to me, more than anyone and had spoken of his life with tough, and unemotional stoicism said, with tears threatening to break through, that he knew why he had survived all that had happened to him - it was for his children and grandchildren to have the opportunity to live on - he was too much the gentleman to give the Nazis the finger - but it was there along with the pain, in his voice.

It is one thing to read about what the Kindertransport did to the children even as it saved their lives, it is another to watch them try to speak about it with a cool clarity as they talked about the seperation from their families, the "not knowing" what had happened to them, the worry about
what might have happened, the loss of everything they knew at a time in life when they should have experienced a totally different life - one of joy, security and flourishing intellect and creativity.

One person, in particular, tore at my heart because he loved his adoptive family and they loved him. So when his parents survived and came for him (and he was one of the very few whose parents survived - very few) he was torn away AGAIN from the love and security of his family.
His parents had become strangers. Seven years old when sent to England, sixteen when his family of origen came for him - they were strangers. So his heart was broken, yet again. There was no recourse - he couldn't stay with his adoptive family when his family of origen wanted him - and he couldn't bend and adjust AGAIN.

People are adaptable - it's mankinds greatest gift.......but it's not infinite and some people break when tested. No-one knows how they would be if tested - or what they would do in such circumstances.

One woman's Father had been unable to part with her and actually pulled her out of the window of the train as it left the station. She ended up in a concentration camp - eight of them in fact -
survived the war (but her parents did not) and was "rescued" at the end of it weighing 58 lbs. And "lucky" to be alive. What a choice to have to make - but who knew the depths to which the German people sank in those years. And, for me, who knows that it couldn't happen again.