Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)

I have slowly been expanding the years of Oscar winners that I watch. This year I've pushed it back to 2000 which adds about 8 movies to my list of films to watch. This was the documentary winner in 2001 and definitely a motivation to look back further and further at documentary winners.

I'm sure you could make 100 different documentaries about subgroups of people from the second world war, but time is definitely running out on getting real interviews with survivors. This film has a very interesting topic and was done really well. The film talks about how Jewish kids in Germany and Poland were treated by classmates, then follows them through the beginning of the Nazi occupation. The Kindertransport was a system established by some Jewish Germans with the British government to allow Jewish children to leave Nazi occupied territory. Approximately 10,000 children were able to go to Britain into foster homes and halfway houses avoiding concentration camps.

It is one of those documentaries that will make you cry. Not many of these kids ever saw there parents again. The scenes where the parents had to watch their kids leave on trains knowing they might never seen them again was hard to get through. Some of the stories were very powerful and this one is worth checking out.

Vote: 8/10

IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0248912/

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