About an hour into my viewing of this documentary about Jewish children transported out of Germany for their own safety on the brink of WW II, my 10-year-old came up and, seeing how engrossed I was, slipped me a note that said:
"Can you change to Disney at 9:30?
This movie is scaring me. Check One: ____yes ____no"
I hadn't occurred to me that from a child's point of view, the movie would be, by turns, frightening, disturbing, and dark. Certainly, up to that point, it was going in that direction. But what I was able to convey later to her (a former orphan herself) is that underneath the darkness there is light, if you look for it. This film was richly layered, as others on this site have already noted, with grief, despair, horror, regret and anguish, true. But countering it is the knowledge that there are good people in the world that will reach out in generosity to the victimized--just as British couples agreed, over a two year period and longer in the late 1930s, to provide homes to 10,000 endangered Jewish children.
Another important positive is evident in every testimony in the film--from former transportees, a foster parent, host families, transport organizers. And that is the fierce, all-encompassing devotion between the Jewish family members affected by a perfect storm of historical events: the rise of a convincing megalomaniac who turned an entire country to antisemitism; increasing hostility in the immediate environment; the inability to earn a living or go to school; the wrenching separation of sending beloved children away; and finally the ultimate crisis of the adults "being transported" to the death camps. Through it all the devotion remains, unshaken. A father who adores his young daughter, hobbling with a cane after the train that is taking her away, takes her hands through the window and manages to pull her out--his overriding love trumping the knowledge that she would be safer away from her family. A 10-year-old on her own initiative goes door to door in London begging wealthy residents to hire her parents so that they can get work visas in order to escape Germany. An older transportee relates with quiet dignity and awe how her father died in a camp: beaten to death for protesting the guard's treatment of older inmates. Photos and restrained musical accompaniment throughout the movie lend both strength and pathos to each story.
One doesn't have to be Jewish--and I am not--to appreciate how family ties and identity can remain intact through sheer will, despite horrific experiences as shown through this film. "Into the Arms" is universally compelling in its scope. It's also expertly crafted by director Harris so that interviewees become familiar and sympathetic protagonists and we raptly follow their stories, all different, in stages. Astutely, he makes sure we see that they are fully human--not angels or mere victims. One woman admits openly that she was taken from foster home to foster home because behaviorally, she was a handful (as one might expect of a child who finds herself living with complete strangers, speaking a foreign language). Another lied to her foster parents to arrange for her sister to be taken in, and cheerfully threw the lie back in their faces when the sister arrived, not at all what they expected.
Finally, I was moved, as I always am, to see how the documentary format helps people deal with their demons by speaking about them. The man whose witness ends the film, whose experiences have been as anguished as anyone's, seems to say it all in discussing why he was saved and others were not, impassioned but optimistic. If you haven't seen "Into the Arms" but are looking for a new prism from which to view the Nazi era and what people in all circumstances can extract from suffering, I highly recommend this film.
