REVIEW: ‘The Windermere Children,’ now on DVD and digital
Photo: Sala (Anna Maciejewska), Arek (Tomasz Studzinski), Juliusz (Lukasz Zieba), Ike (Kuba Sprenger), Sam (Marek Wrobelewski), Salek (Jakub Jankiewicz), Ben (Pascal Fischer) and Chaim (Kacper Swietek) are the real-life characters portrayed in The Windermere Children. Photo courtesy of Wall to Wall Media Limited / Provided by PBS Pressroom with permission.
The Windermere Children, the new TV movie from PBS, recounts a small, yet profound chapter in the lives of 300 Jewish children who were sent to the English countryside to deal with the physical and emotional toll of experiencing the Holocaust. The survivors turn up in buses to the Calgarth Estate near the picturesque surroundings of Lake Windermere, circa 1945. They have faced personal devastation, with most of them losing their families in concentration camps, and now they must start processing what happened and considering how they might build a future beyond the war.
The 90-minute film, written by Simon Block and directed by Michael Samuels, offers many interesting and sad insights into how these children coped with being in a new country and finally safe from harm.
There are several early scenes in which the staff of this estate make some unfortunate errors in how they interact with the children. For example, they try to split up the boys from the girls, but several of the children have formed small groups and refuse to be pulled apart. When they are asked to disrobe and take new clothes, they are fascinated and terrified by the Scottish sports coach (Iain Glen from Game of Thrones) igniting their old and dirty belongings in a bonfire — no doubt a reminder of the camps and the fires of war.
In the local village, the children head out for an ice cream at a small shop, and they face the anti-Semitism of the surrounding community when a small group of English boys pulls up and starts mimicking the Nazi salute. The leader of this rescue and rehabilitation project, child psychologist Oscar Friedmann (Thomas Kretschmann), has a wonderful scene in which he goes up to these boys and corrects their Nazi salute, demanding that they do the action again, right in front of his face. He says, calmly, that he’s a German Jew, and they should know better and start to realize the horrors of the past few years for these child survivors.
Another unpleasant sequence involves a local woman who clutches her dog and raises her nose at these child refugees. She sees them as a “foreign” problem, and they should not be a burden for England, who, in her mind, suffered just enough during WWII. Parallels to today’s continued refugee crisis are obvious and appreciated.
Despite the many negatives that these hundreds of children face in their multi-month stay, there are also some positives. Two young teenagers find their first love. A team of boys field a soccer team under the rough leadership of Glen’s Jock Lawrence character. They start studying English and try out their new linguistic skills to win over doubting locals.
Still, despite their progress, there is an unspeakable dismay hovering over each and every one of them. The children, some quite young and some nearing adulthood, begin to realize that their families are probably not coming back to save them from this foreign country. They begin to comprehend that they may be the only survivors left of their respective families, and this understanding causes constant nightmares and bouts of depression. In their heart, they simply want to see their mothers, fathers and siblings again.
The Windermere Children, now available on DVD and digital, offers a quick and fitting historical lesson about a chapter in Holocaust studies that sometimes is forgotten. There are no actual scenes of the concentration camps or the deadly war across Europe — not even flashbacks. Instead, this TV movie is concerned with that pivotal question of how an individual and a community are able to figure out life after the bullets stop flying — a crucial time period when the new normal sets in. This perspective is important to learn from, for it honors the fallen and perhaps lays a groundwork for future healing.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Windermere Children. Directed by Michael Samuels. Written by Simon Block. Starring Thomas Kretschmann, Romola Garai, Tim Mcinnerney and Iain Glen. Running time: 90 minutes. Rating: 
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