Join us for a film screening of the documentaries My Knees Were Jumping – Remembering the Kindertransports and 256,000 Miles From Home by Melissa Hacker. Followed by a discussion with filmmaker and Kindertransport Association Executive Director Melissa Hacker and 2g writer and activist Esther Dischereit.
In the nine months just prior to World War II nearly 10,000 children were sent, without their parents, to Great Britain from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. These children were rescued by the Kindertransport movement. Most of the children never saw their parents again as they soon after boarded trains taking them to concentration camps.
My Knees Were Jumping – Remembering the Kindertransports
One of the children that were rescued by a Kindertransport was Melissa Hacker’s mother, who fled from Vienna and eventually settled in the United States, where she became an Academy Award nominated costume designer, working on films such Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, The Hustler, The Miracle Worker, Tootsie, and many more classic American movies. She is a strong presence of the film talking about her experiences alongside other former child refugees, many of them women. They remember the antisemitism of schoolmates and neighbours, the violence and their fears of the Kristallnacht, the difficult decision their parents had to make to send them off into the unknown, and how they were received in England by foster families. Hacker gives them plenty of space to talk and reflect on past events making this film a moving and invaluable record of testimony.
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