Kindertransport - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The first documentary film made on the subject of the Kindertransport was My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports which was shown, and nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and released theatrically in 1998. The director, Melissa Hacker, is the daughter of the costume designer Ruth Morley who was a Kindertransport child. The film is narrated by Joanne Woodward

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, narrated by Judi Dench and released by Warner Bros. Pictures, won the Academy Award in 2001 for best documentary feature. There is also a companion book by the same name. The film's producer, Deborah Oppenheimer, is the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor. The director, Mark Jonathan Harris, is a three-time Oscar winner.

The Children Who Cheated the Nazis, narrated by Richard Attenborough is a British documentary film by Sue Read and Jim Goulding, first shown on Channel 4 in 2000. Attenborough's parents were among those who responded to the appeal for families to foster the refugee children; they took in two girls.

Kindertransport: The Play, is the name of a play by Diane Samuels, which examines the life, during World War II and afterwards, of a Kindertransport child. Among other things, it presents the confusions and traumas that arose for many kinder before, and after, they were fully integrated into their English foster-homes; and, as importantly, when their real parents reappeared in their life, or more likely and tragically, when they learned that their real parents were dead.

In the novel The Remains of the Day and subsequent film adaptation, two teenage refugee sisters fleeing Germany are employed in Lord Darlington's household, only to be dismissed soon afterwards when Darlington, a Nazi sympathiser, reads the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Austerlitz, by the Anglo-German novelist W G Sebald, is an odyssey of a kindertransport boy brought up in a Welsh manse who later traces his origins to Prague and then goes back there. He finds someone who knew his mother, and he retraces his journey by train

Sisterland, a young adult novel by Linda Newbery, concerns a Kindertransport child, Sarah Reubens, who is now a grandmother; sixteen-year-old Hilly uncovers the secret her grandmother has kept hidden for years. This novel was shortlisted for the 2003 Carnegie Medal.

Far to Go, a novel by Alison Pick, a Canadian writer and descendant of European Jews, is the fictional account of a Sudetenland Jewish family who after fleeing to Prague use bribery to secure a place for their six-year old son aboard one of Nicholas Winton's transports.

The English German Girl, a novel published in 2011 by Jake Wallis Simons, a British writer, is the fictional account of a 15-year-old Jewish girl from Berlin who is brought to England via the kindertransport operation.

In BBC1's The Kindertransport Story, three rescued children, now in their eighties, tell their moving stories. Also taking part in the programme was Lord Attenborough, whose own parents took in two girls after responding to the urgent appeal for foster families.