DIRECTOR STATEMENT

Racist hatred is on the rise everywhere – breaking hearts and tearing lives apart. Such hatred caused my grandfather to lose everything in the Holocaust, torn from his parents and thrust into a new life in an unknown land, unable to communicate. My grandfather has often spoken and written about his experience — but never about his childhood feelings. In asking him to talk from the perspective of his seven-year-old self, I began to sense the potential power of juxtaposing his childhood experience with the historical reality of the Nazis. It is dangerously easy to become numb to human suffering — and to fail to act against hatred. Although at one level the Holocaust feels unimaginable today, the rise of racial hatred is now palpable — and the warnings of history are being ignored. I felt it was critical to explore how film can be a medium through which this tendency to become complacent can be countered. I felt that integrating the poignant personal story from a child’s perspective with the wider historical reality can disarm our defences, allowing the human suffering to touch our hearts and motivate us to stand against the rise of racism and fascism today.

In this heart-rending documentary short a seven year old boy is torn from his home in Dresden on Kristallnacht, rushed across the border into Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis in Germany, then ripped from his parents on the eve of war. His grandson, Director Amos Menin, blends family photographs with archival and contemporary footage to form a deeply personal and emotive backdrop, against which the survivor recalls the dramatic and devastating story of his escape from the Holocaust, and came to England on Nicholas Winton’s last Kindertransport. This is a poignant and deeply moving story of racial hatred from the child’s view yet speaks of the insurmountable human spirit.

meet THE DIRECTOR: AMOS MENIN

Amos is a filmmaker based in Northumberland, UK. He is in his final year studying filmmaking at the Northern Film School, and specialises in Cinematography. Amos has always had a fascination with imaging storytelling, and his filmmaking career started by directing a number of shorts, including a film in a BFI Academy in Newcastle, which was nominated for several film festivals. He specialises in cinematography and hopes to progress into the industry to continue tell stories through the lens.