Join film director Melissa Hacker in conversation with Rachel Stern about My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports. In the talk, Melissa will show a new short film on the Kindertransports, 256,000 miles from home, which travels with four Kindertransport survivors as they retrace the journey they took 80 years earlier, as unaccompanied child refugees.
The filmmaker Melissa Hacker’s mother, the Academy Award nominated costume designer Ruth Morley, neé Birnholz, (Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, The Hustler, The Miracle Worker, Tootsie, and many more classic American movies) fled Vienna on a Kindertransport in January 1939. She is a strong presence in the film talking about her experiences alongside other former child refugees, many of them women. Ruth and the writer Lore Segal, also a Kindertransport survivor from Vienna, remember the antisemitism of schoolmates and neighbors, the violence and their fears on November 9, 1938, the difficult decision their parents had to make to send them off into the unknown, and their lives in the United Kingdom. We learn about their postwar lives in North America, and hear from their children, the second generation. Hacker creates space for all to talk and reflect, making this film a moving and invaluable record of testimony.
Melissa Hacker is the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor from Vienna, Austria, and the Executive Director of the Kindertransport Association. Melissa is a filmmaker who made her directing debut with the documentary My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination and shown worldwide. Honors received For Ex Libris, A Life in Bookplates, Melissa’s current work in progress, include a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence award in Vienna, and residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, Playa, Willapa Bay AIR, Saltonstall, Millay, and the LABA Laboratory for Jewish Culture.
Melissa has spoken internationally on the Kindertransports, consulted on exhibits including Rescuing Children on the Brink of War created at the Center for Jewish History in New York and opening at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum in September 2025, and Without a Home: Kindertransports from Vienna, at the Vienna Jewish Museum. Melissa is the editor of two Academy Award nominated documentary films, a wandering professor, most recently in Yangon, Myanmar, and serves on the Governing Board of the World Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants.
This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression” organized by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art in New York.