News Release
November 2002
| Winner
of 2002 International Emmy Award for Documentary
The International Academy
of Television Arts & Sciences announced the winners of the
30th International New York City on Monday, November 25, 2002.
"Nicholas Winton - The Power of Good" by
Matej Minac & Patrik Pass was selected in the category of
documentary.
WIP/Trigon
Production/Czech Television/Slovak Television (Slovak Republic)
Synopsis: This film is the story of the courage and determination
of one man who in 1939 saved 669 Czechoslovak Jewish children
from the hands of the Nazis. For fifty years, Mr. Winton (aged
93) did not tell anyone about his rescue mission, not even his
wife. Mr. Winton appears with a dozen of the children as Canadian
CBC reporter Joe Schlesinger and film director Karel Reisz tell
his story for the first time. |
(Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) - The Power of Good,
a documentary film about Nicolas Winton, a British diplomat who provided
entry visas to England for more than 700 Jewish children during the
Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, will be shown at Moravian College
at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, November 27, in Prosser Auditorium in the Haupert
Union
Building. A reception for the filmmakers will follow in
the HUB lounge.
Nicolas Winton: The Power of Good will be introduced
by its director, Matej Minac, and its editor and co-producer, Patrik
Pass, who are also the makers of a feature film, All My Loved Ones
(2002), about a Jewish family under the German occupation. In this film,
Winton is a secondary character who helps a Czech Jewish family realize
that the Nazi threat is real and that its children must be sent out
of the country to survive.
"This event, held on the evening before Thanksgiving
Break, is indeed an ideal time to consider what one could be grateful
for," says Anne Dutlinger, assistant professor of art and chairman
of the Art Department, which is co-sponsoring the film. "We think
that the story of Winton has great appeal for a present-day audience,
especially students," says Minac. "It shows that an individual
has great power and can change history in a very positive way."
Winton was a junior member of the British embassy staff
in Prague at the start of World War II. Realizing what the Nazis planned
for the Jews of Europe, he issued British travel documents to Jewish
children-and when he could not do so according to the letter of British
immigration law, he provided false passports. He also helped assure
that the children were placed in foster homes until their parents could
claim them. However, very few of the children ever saw their parents
again, as the Jews of Czechoslovakia were largely destroyed in the concentration
camps.
Winton told no one of his actions for almost 50 years
after the war. In the late 1990s, his wife, cleaning their attic as
they prepared to move to a retirement home, found a box of passport
applications and children's photographs. She asked him where they had
come from, and only then did his heroic act become known.
In 1998, he was interviewed on BBC television, in front
of an audience of his "children" who had been assembled secretly
by the talk-show's producer. After Winton spoke in the most diffident
terms about the three trainloads of children that he had sent from Prague,
the interviewer asked if anyone in the audience had anything to add
to his story. The audience members rose to their feet, overwhelming
the old man, who began to cry as he hugged them. This poignant moment
is show in the epilogue to All My Loved Ones.
Minac, a Slovakian Jew, calls Winton "the last rescuer,"
comparable to Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, and wonders why
no filmmaker before him was attracted to Winton's story. He had learned
of Winton's role in his own survival by chance in "two tiny paragraphs"
of a book called Pearls of Childhood by Vera Gissing, who had
been one of Winton's children. When he talked to Gissing during the
filming of All My Loved Ones, which is the story of his own
family, he was surprised to find out that Winton was alive and in good
health. He was able to obtain footage of the television interview and
incorporate it into the feature film. Then he went back and made a full-length
documentary about Winton's heroism.
Dutlinger, who has been instrumental in bringing the film
and its makers to Moravian, curated the 2000 Payne Gallery exhibit Art,
Music and Education as Strategies for Survival:: Theresienstadt 1941-45
and a frequent speaker about this concentration camp where Jewish artists
and children created art, music, drama, and literature almost until
the end of the war. In 1944 the population of Terezín was deported
to Auschwitz.
The event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored
by the Art Department, the student programming board IMPACT, the Chaplain's
Office, the Art Club, and the Political Forum, in cooperation with the
Honorable Consul General of the Czeck Republic (Philadelphia). For more
information, call 610 861-1491.
