Closely Watched Trains

The story of Nicholas Winton, a young British stockbroker who spent his own time and money to bring some 700 Czech Jewish children to England when World War II broke out, fascinated the audience that filled Prosser Auditorium last semester to see a documentary about this little-known Holocaust rescuer.
The film was shown November 26, the day after it won an International Emmy Award for its Slovakian director, Matej Minac, and its editor and producer, Patrik Pass.

Though Minac is himself the son of a Holocaust survivor*, he had not heard of Winton until he began to film All My Loved Ones (2000), an original script about a Czech Jewish family that feels the Nazi regime closing around it in 1939. Minac came across the mention of Winton’s rescue project in a book by a woman who had been one of the children he saved. He made Winton (played by Rupert Graves) an incidental character in the film, helping the family make the difficult decision to send its children to England.

Though it is almost three years old, All My Loved Ones has not been picked up for commercial distribution by any American presenter. So its screening at Moravian as part of the eighth Jewish-Israeli Film Festival of the Lehigh Valley is a rare opportunity to see it.

The film will be shown at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, February 9, in Prosser Auditorium. A limited number of complimentary tickets are available to students at the HUB desk.

A panel discussion will follow with Peter Rafaeli, honorary Czech consul of Philadelphia; Hans Wuerth, professor emeritus of German and a scholar of the Holocaust; and Rabbi Seth Frisch, Jewish chaplain and professor of Hebrew Bible at Moravian Theological Seminary.

Tickets: $8, $7 seniors/students. 610 861-1583.

*Minac’s mother, Zuzana Minacova, survived Auschwitz. She now lives in Bratislava, Slovakia. A well-known photographer, she has published a reconstructed version of her family’s lost photographs, using present-day family and friends to pose as the cousins, uncles, parents, and children who disappeared in the death camps.

Two scenes from the film All My Loved Ones. Above: The Silberstein family waits anxiously at the Prague railway station to see if its children will be allowed to board a train to freedom. Top: Nicholas Winton (Rupert Graves) comforts the youngest Silberstein child.