One Life, many histories

One Life is the new film telling the story of Sir Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who, working with colleagues from the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), organised for 669 refugee children in Czechoslovakia to find safe homes in Great Britain in 1939 as war loomed in Europe. Most of the children that Winton and the BCRC saved were Jewish, but you wouldn’t know it from the promotional text that was initially circulated online. This came to light yesterday in a tweet from HMV promoting the DVD of the film, which called them “Central European children” - sparking a round of social media outrage.

It wasn’t only HMV that used this form of words. To their credit, Warner Bros and See-Saw Films, who made One Life, have swiftly amended their own promotional material to clarify that the 669 rescued children were “predominantly Jewish”. It would be a shame if this row overshadowed what is a beautiful and emotional telling of an important story.

Problem solved? Not quite. Because the underplaying of the Jewish identity of most of the children isn’t limited to the film’s marketing but runs through the film itself. The on-screen text that sets the scene before the action begins doesn’t mention Jews, nor does anyone else until around 20 minutes in. The closing text doesn’t tell the audience that 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. Other than a single short scene where Winton meets a Rabbi in Prague to discuss placing Jewish children with non-Jewish foster families in Britain (the Rabbi isn’t keen), you could easily miss most of the passing references to Jews in the script. There is no explanation of why Jews in particular would be fleeing Nazi invasion, nor anything about the growing persecution of Jews in Germany since 1933. In fact, there is barely any portrayal of antisemitism in the film at all. And that’s before you even get to the thorny and painful question of why the children had to leave their parents behind, most of whom died in the Nazi inferno. As Jonathan Freedland put it in his review of One Life:

the children are mostly presented as generic European refugees from Adolf Hitler, with little explanation of exactly why they – and their parents, whom Britain refuses to take in – are not safe staying in Czechoslovakia. The trailer for the film does not say the J-word at all.

It feels like it’s part of a trend, this playing down of antisemitism, an emphasising of the universal lessons of the Holocaust in ways that erase its specifically Jewish aspects. This is not to deny that there are universal lessons to be drawn. The Nuremberg Trials, which held Nazi leaders to account after the Second World War, categorised the extermination of populations on racial or religious grounds as “crimes against humanity”, as if to emphasise that the unfathomable depravity of the Nazi genocide was an affront to all the world. But it is possible for the pendulum to swing too far towards a universalist message, to the point where it can feel like the fact the Nazis’ primary victims were Jews becomes incidental. This would be profoundly wrong. As I argued in Everyday Hate, the Holocaust could only have happened to the Jews, because antisemitism was, and remains, unique:

The Holocaust was the greatest crime ever committed on European soil, and it could only have been inflicted on the Jews in the time, place and way that it was, because it was only in relation to Jews that this murderous mix of religious intolerance, bogus science, conspiracy theory, myth, libel, fear and contempt had such a hold on the European imagination.

Yet to assume that One Life is just another example of a Holocaust story that omits its most important plotline would be to over-simplify in the other direction, because the truth about Nicholas Winton’s rescue operation is more complex still. When Winton turned up in Prague in December 1938, the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia that he made contact with was not focused primarily on rescuing Jews at all. The BCRC and the wider British effort in Czechoslovakia treated “racial refugees” - i.e. Jews - as the lowest priority for assistance. Their priority at that time was to find ways to help “political refugees”, who were mainly German and Austrian anti-Nazis at immediate risk of arrest. Some of these political refugees were Jewish, but many were not, and their Jewishness was not a relevant criteria for the BCRC. It’s a reminder that it was not only Jews who were fleeing the Nazi advance; many others had their own reasons to fear Nazism and seek sanctuary elsewhere.

To complicate matters further, the Czech and British governments both showed hostility towards Jewish refugees, in different ways. The Czechs were keen to keep out Jewish refugees from the Sudetenland - formerly Czech territory handed to Nazi Germany in the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement - and was similarly keen to encourage those already within its borders to emigrate. The British government was funding refugee support within Czechoslovakia but did not want to prioritise Jews for visas to enter Britain. This was the year of the Evian Conference, when almost the entire world closed its doors to Jewish refugees, leaving them to their fate once the war began. As the historian Louise London put it, “The fact that Jews were wanted by neither the Germans nor the Czechs was not seen as sufficient reason to offer them refuge in Britain.”

It was only in April 1939, after the Nazis invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia, that Winton’s colleagues in Prague understood that the Jewish children on their lists were the most vulnerable simply because they were Jewish and began to prioritise them for rescue. In the end, most of the 669 children rescued by Winton and his colleagues were Jewish, and Winton and his colleagues deserve all the praise and admiration they belatedly received for their remarkable act, but they did not set out to rescue Jewish children specifically, and British government policy towards Jewish refugees was far more ambivalent than we like to remember.

Today the Kindertransport, which brought around 10,000 German, Austrian and Czech children, almost all Jewish, to safety in Britain, is held up as a shining example of British generosity and compassion, and of our country’s opposition to antisemitism. The saving of thousands of children’s lives is definitely worthy of celebration; but the post-war legend of a heroic British effort to rescue Jewish children is not really the full story. It was led and organised by private individuals and organisations, and those children who did make it to Britain needed private sponsors who would pay for them. Their parents were deliberately excluded from the scheme, because the British government thought that the public would not accept thousands more adult Jewish refugees on top of those already here.

I doubt that the marketing teams at Warner Bros or HMV intended to convey this complicated history through the omission of Jews and opaque references to “Central European children”. More likely that they inadvertently stumbled on something closer to the truth than they intended or realised because they confused universalism - making the children generic refugees - with inclusivity, which involves recognising them as Jewish *and* universally sympathetic.

The online reaction to the omission of Jews from the original marketing shows just how hurtful this was, and it can’t be separated from more general Jewish sensitivities over antisemitism. Jewish fears of the heightened antisemitism we are living through right now are entwined with a parallel concern that antisemitism is consistently downplayed or ignored by people, especially on the left, who are usually quick to support victims of racism. It’s a double hit: not only are we under greater attack, but we are less likely to get support. There is a pervasive sense that many on the anti-racist left do not see antisemitism as a form of racism at all, or certainly not one worth bothering with, because Jews are no longer viewed as an oppressed people who can suffer racism. In this atmosphere, a film that presents Jews as helpless refugees, poor and downtrodden, relying on help from sympathetic strangers (who in reality were largely from the left), doesn’t fit. Far easier and more in line with the zeitgeist to obscure their Jewishness and present them as generic “Central Europeans”. At least, that’s what a lot of people assumed was going on when they saw that tweet from HMV.

It’s a reminder that any attempt to portray history - even something you’d think is as straightforward as a story about rescuing children from Nazis - will be interpreted and judged through the political and social framing of today. It’s hard to avoid, even though the identity politics of 2023 are far removed from the racial politics of the 1930s. And that’s a shame, because Nicholas Winton and his colleagues really were heroes who performed remarkable deeds of courage and selfless humanity, and theirs is a story that is definitely worth telling.