Jews fleeing Hitler weren’t the same as today’s asylum seekers
I TOO choke with unexpected tears at the famous scene when Nicholas Winton, then not honoured or even much known, found himself in a TV studio with scores of people whose lives he had saved half a century before, when they were children. Who cannot?
But I am not sure of the purpose of the new film about Sir Nicholas, One Life, in which he is played in old age by Anthony Hopkins.
In an early scene, set in the late 1980s, he is shown listening to a radio news broadcast about Tamil refugees. I can only assume this is supposed to suggest that the refugees from modern conflicts are pretty much the same as the ones Sir Nicholas saved. But they aren’t, just as modern conservatives who object to unlimited migration are not Nazis. The film’s timing turns out to be sensitive, as it reminds us all of the reasons for the existence of the State of Israel. The children Sir Nicholas rescued were Jews, who would have been murdered in death camps if he had not got them out of Prague when he did.
There was not much doubt about this after the Nazi state had openly supported a horrifying anti-Jewish pogrom all across Germany in November 1938, in which Jews were killed for being Jews (a policy shared today by Hamas).
Many who could not be rescued did in fact die in the years afterwards. Their parents (who we did not allow into Britain) suspected they were saying goodbye for ever when they waved their sons and daughters farewell on stations across Europe. And they were right. They would almost all be murdered in Nazi death camps.
The story is far more complicated than the film can possibly show, and the politics of the time are explained in the usual Ladybird Book way, assuming that Britain (then, as now, a weak and indebted country with ramshackle and unprepared armed forces) was an almighty superpower which could and should have ‘stood up to Hitler’ in 1938.
Actually, the refugee trains stopped the moment we did go to war in 1939, and thereafter we did almost nothing to help Europe’s endangered Jews, which is a fact we might ponder from time to time.