I mentioned in my last post that we had recently watched the DVD of One Life. My hearing is not so great to watch films in a cinema so I always prefer to watch them at home on DVD, when they come out, as I can use subtitles. Darcy had bought me this DVD for my birthday as he knew I would be very interested in this film, given my family history.
The film portrays the life and work of Nicholas Winton who bravely masterminded the evacuation of 669 children from Prague to England at at time when the Nazis were about to invade Czechoslovakia in 1938. It alternates between following Anthony Hopkins playing a 79-year old Winton reminiscing on his past, and Johnny Flynn as a 29-year old Winton who successfully helps 669 predominantly Jewish children to escape the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and the threat of living in ghettos or facing concentration camps, just before the beginning of World War II.
It was a very emotional film on various levels and I won't go into any more detail to spoil it, in case you do want to see it. Although my father escaped Nazi Germany in early 1939 (not through the help of Nicholas Winton but with the help of English Quakers via the Kindertransport), there were many similarities, such as the children arriving at Liverpool Street station in London with labels round their necks to match them up with the English people who would look after them. My father had also arrived at Liverpool Street Station at the age of 15, not able to speak more than ten vital words of English. Seeing it as a film, it drove home to me what it must have been like for my father, rather than just the sketchy hand-me-down stories in our family history.
Anthony Hopkins looked remarkably like the real man. I recall as a young woman watching the That's Life programme on television which featured at the end of the One Life film. It brought shivers down my spine to see it again.
He was awarded an OBE and later a Knighthood for his humanitarian work and many more accolades, including a statue of him in Prague railway station. He died in 2015 at the age of 106. What a man. What a hero.
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| Anthony Hopkins in the film as Nicholas Winton |
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