In 1938 a stockbroker from London travelled to Prague to help the British Council of Refugees arrange safe transit for people fleeing the expansion of Nazi Germany; his name was Nicky Winton. His experience in Prague inspired him to create the Children's Section of the British Council of Refugees and he promised the people that he had to leave behind, both British and Czech, that he would do everything that he could to help rescue the children at least; this film is about what Nicky Winton achieved and how it remained unknown for most of his life.
Sir Anthony Hopkins gives both a powerful and an understated performance of a surprisingly humble man who is moved by empathy and compassion to just do something to help in a world that is turning to madness some twenty years after the end of World War One. As his German mother declares, Britain stood for something then, decency and compassion; qualities that we no longer see in the British state today. Her son acts on his parents' teachings and achieves something that to us today seems somewhat incredible; he saved 669 children from the Holocaust that was to come.
Johnny Flynn plays the young Nicky Winton alongside Helena Bonham-Carter as his mother, Babi. He is earnest, reserved, but determined and able to inspires others to help extend a hand of friendship and aid to people in Central Europe who are experiencing appalling conditions and growing persecution. The film's attention to historical detail is commendable and leads to some harrowing scenes; there is no attempt to satisfy a modern day social agenda in any respect. The last point is important because as bad as the ghetto scenes are they do not compare to what we, as the audience, know is coming for these people who will die in places like Auschwitz. It is that knowledge that lends to true power to the emotions that are stoked by this story and writers Lucinda Coxon, Nick Drake, and Barabara Winton use it with both subtlety and effect. Director James Hawes keeps the story about the main characters, depicting the courage and finer qualities of a disparate group of volunteers who worked for as long as possible to help others in growing desperation. Some of them made it back to Britain themselves, but many of the Czech colleagues did not and were never seen again.
'One Life' is a powerful film that represents the good that can be found in 'normal people', as Nicky Winton himself called them. Winton himself never talked about what he did and it was only much later in life that his story was discovered and eventually told. He obsessed about those that he failed, and never really thought about the 669 that he saved; but his efforts were given meaning in a context that allowed Nicky Winton to be kinder to himself, even though he remained a very humble man.
As the credits of the film rolled I wondered what Nicky Winton would have thought of the actions of the Isreali state today in Gaza? How is it possible that the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust could become the monster that people like Winton, and everyone else who participated in World War Two on the side of the allies, fought so hard to stop? Sadly, it seems that history is indeed doomed to repeat itself.
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