Hello and welcome!
This week I paid a visit to a cinema. Nothing particularly special or noteworthy in such an act. I have not really ever been a regular movie or cinematic person. I go to the cinema if my curiosity is peaked enough or if I am in good company that collectively has that goal. It takes a lot to drag me out otherwise! So as you can imagine that is not that often in practice. I am more comfortable, more engaged, more enthralled by the prospect of a concert hall than by the cinema.
I seem to be out of synchronicity with the modern themes and pre-occupations of Hollywood in particular at the moment. Although in contrast to Hollywood I really did like Lola Igna, a Tagalog movie a few years back. Though I was not entirely sure why! Manilla has a thriving TV/Film industry.
I suppose I have to admit that I am no longer the target market audience. I am old, fustian and set in my ways. Not the right demographic. Not the right ethnographic perhaps. Certainly not the right person when it comes to conforming with the prevailing political mood, vibe and views (I don't belong anywhere in politics and political parties at the moment). The Marvel franchise for example has largely and mostly passed me by. Superheroes and their personal battles with their own antitheses, are not really my thing.
I will watch stuff with Jean on Netflix on occasions. She got me to watch with her the Netflix adaptation of the anime “One Piece” that her sons watched on TV when they were young. I admit I began, after two or three, to enjoy the storyline. I like fantastical stuff like that. After all I did buy the complete anime of the Last Airbender back in those pandemic days in an effort to complete the story I had seen and begun with my own boys on TV years before!
If I see or hear of a series that peaks my interest, I can now always buy it through my Apple Account or some such platform and watch it at my pleasure. This is in fact what I did with the British TV prequel to the detective series Morse: Endeavour. Surprising myself, once again, with the fact that I do like detective stories! Although by now, there really should be no surprise.
However this week, whilst shopping in my local mall, I saw an advertisement for a film that made me think I should go and see it. I guess those adverts on neon screens that are atop escalators can be effective hooks! After all I was just standing there for a minute being moved from floor to floor. A captured audience! Though the regular advert for Indian verynayan therapies….appeals not. Ever.
The film is “One Life”. Of itself nothing to make me want to see it. It was the name of Nicolas Winton in the byline, that did appeal instantly. He is one of my country's best adverts for decency, cultivated values and civilised living. Hard working. Hard giving of himself to those less fortunate than himself. These things are sorely lacking, sorely eroded and dismissed in this apparently better 21st Century Britain.
The reason is that Nicolas Winton acted. He did stuff. Not in an ostentatious way. There was a need at a particular time, and he had some skills to bring to bear and change, if only in a small way, that situation. He did it. When it ended, as it did, in tragic circumstances: he moved on. Got on with life and the next chapter of his life. After all it was the start of a World War where his own country was now fighting for its very existence as well.
This aspect of his story has always struck me the most. That aspect of commitment and selflessness. Of not doing something for the limelight or fame; but because he could, even for just a small window of time. I have always personally felt that the Scripture that best sums up Nicolas Winton (He was brought up in a Christian Anglican Tradition with Jewish family heritage and so would have known this parable for himself) is in the parable that Jesus told his disciples found in Luke Chapter 18:
10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.’ 13 And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be [a]humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
So what did he do? He organised and co-ordinated with a team of brave Czechs in Praha and later in London an effort that saved 669 children from Czechoslovakia (as it was then) in 1939 from certain death either sooner or later at the hands of the Nazi tyranny. Jewish children, who once they had come to Britain, would tragically never see their Parents again. Who mostly, could not remember why it was that they survived, lived in freedom. The freedom to worship as they choose without interference. The freedom to choose the kind of life that they wanted: careers, marriage and family, travel, education. The freedom I have enjoyed to make a mess of things and learn personal responsibility. For that is the demanding discipline and flip side of freedom.
Both Fascist and Communist State ideologies do not do this. They cannot.
Nicolas Winton's Story is now well known because his wife found the scrapbook of his in the attic in the 1980s dating back to 1939. I will let you dear readers go and find out the story of how we now know about this decent human being, for yourselves. Any perfunctory web search will get the results you need. Or even better and recommended, follow the link at the end of this article and watch a thorough documentary of the whole story. I want to finish with some thoughts about the movie itself.
I enjoyed the movie. I thought it was well acted and that in particular Anthony Hopkins, captured the essence of Nicolas Winton as that elderly humanitarian. It is not like a Hollywood blockbuster that examines the story in detail, like Schindlers list. I personally was grateful for that. Steven Spielbergs movie is iconic as art. It always has the Aristotelian cathartic effect upon me when I see it.
Nicolas Winton was a totally different character and requires a different movie and tone. Yet I did think that in the scenes set in Czechoslovakia there was a lot missed. I did like the scenes when Nicolas is challenged about why he would get involved in trying to transport children out of refugee camps too Britain when he is in fact just ordinary person on an extended holiday/leave? The actor Johnny Flynn who plays the young Nicolas says perfectly, “I am just an ordinary person’’ and that is all the justification he and his Czech colleagues, who are the same, need.
Still, that aspect of history is glossed over too much for my liking. Too many loose strands. Too many unsaid, unspoken, unanalysed things about the horror unfolding in 1939 as a Democracy is destroyed, dismantled and partly given to a Dictator at first by fellow Democratic States like Britain itself. Perhaps hoping to save their own people from the very horror they inflicted on others without qualm. That aspect was not touched upon at all. It should have been. That is the Praha that Nicolas Winton found himself in.
Also lacking is any reason, identification of why the Nazi regime had racial essentialist and supremacist views in the first place. What were they? Why were they? It could have been stated more accurately than it was. Why were those children in so much peril? Being a refugee is bad enough. But why were these children and their parents in an even more precarious situation stuck in central Europe? Perhaps it is assumed that we already know. Or perhaps it might just make some of us confront our own views and values in 2024? That might be uncomfortable. Like Spielbergs movie.
This movie has a different aim. It is a celebration of a life we would never have known about, except for a scrapbook found. A life left uncelebrated for the good that flowed from that beating heart and focussed mind able to comprehend morality being challenged and then act morally in response. I do get that. It works in its way.
I just wish it had not been the BBC that produced this. I would have preferred a less bland and quick approach to serious issues and a serious man. More accurate history. More serious focus on the issues in 1939. More focus on the lifelong service that Nicolas led after WW2. This was not a one off deed or a special occasion in his life.
I really would have liked also there to have been a part about the children growing up and carving out their lives, with that question: how did this happen for me? As it happens, just such a documentary exists! As I said, the movie is ok in its way.
Yet this documentary, narrated by the great late Canadian journalist J. Schlesinger (who was one of those children), is everything I really want. Go see the movie. Yet watch and learn from this:
Have a blessed week everyone.
Yours,
Syre Byrd
Postscript. The picture that goes with today’s writing is of the Czech Republic’s highest Honour to a Civilian courtesy of the Národní museum, Praha. Awarded to Nicolas Winton when he was 105 years old!