The Windermere Children review: True story of Jewish children orphaned by WWII is full of quietly devastating moments

4 stars

The Windermere Children (BBC2)

Pat Stacey

As if we weren’t already feeling enough despair at the state of US politics and society right now, the news last week that over half of American adults don’t know how many Jews died in the Holocaust was a shocking revelation.

Fifty-five percent of those surveyed gave wildly varying wrong answers, ranging from a million to 12 million. One in three said they weren’t sure or just didn’t bother to answer the question.

This wasn’t the limit of their ignorance. Sixty-seven percent thought the Holocaust took place as early as 1930 or as late as 1950. One in 10 people thought it happened between 1910 and 1930, while one in 100 thought it was some time between and 1950-1970. Eighteen percent declined to answer.

When you read statistics as profoundly depressing as these, it makes you grateful that European broadcasters, at least, still care enough about history to make programmes like The Windermere Children, a co-production between the BBC and Germany’s ZDF.

The 90-minute film drama, written by Bafta-nominated Simon Block, who penned 2015’s The Eichmann Show, about the fight to have Adolf Eichmann’s trial televised, was broadcast simultaneously in Britain and Germany last night to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Block’s spare, understated screenplay and Michael Samuels’ unfussy direction combined to quietly heartbreaking effect in an account of one of the saddest, yet at the same time most uplifting, true stories to emerge from the nightmare of the Holocaust.

In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, 300 orphaned Jewish children, most of whom had seen their entire families slaughtered in the Nazi concentration camps, were brought to Calgarth Estate in Windermere in England’s Lake District to recuperate.

The operation, funded by charity donations, was the brainchild of Leonard Montefiore (Tim McInnerny), a kind-hearted if slightly stiff and awkward philanthropist. He secured the estate, which used to house workers when seaplanes were being built there during the war.

Montefiore is the organiser, but the ones who’ll be gently and compassionately trying to guide the children, some of whom have never known life outside the camps, back to some kind of normality are a team of professionals, led by gentle, patient German child psychologist Oscar Friedmann (Thomas Kretschmann).

Also on the team is psychologist Marie Paneth (Romola Garai), who specialises in art therapy and whose professional detachment crumbles when she sees the children are painting pictures full of darkness, horror and death.

The children’s spiritual needs are looked after by Rabbi Weiss (Konstantin Frank), while gravelly but soft-hearted sports coach Jock Lawrence (Iain Glen) takes care of their physical health.

These seasoned performers are happy to step back and cede the limelight to the wonderful cast of German and Polish youngsters playing the profoundly traumatised children.

There’s no bombast, no histrionics in the film. It’s full of quietly devastating moments. As the children troop inside and are separated into boy and girl groups and told to remove their dirty clothes, it all feels too similar to what they went through in the camps.

When Jock asks a boy his name, he shows him the number tattooed on his arm. When he asks him where he’s from, he reels off the names of the four camps in which he’s spent the bulk of his young life.

At breakfast, the children, all malnourished, grab bread from the table and scatter in case it’s snatched away again.

Old habits die hard. But die they do, as fear gradually gives way to trust, humanity is rediscovered and lives are rebuilt. What can never be recovered, however, are the parents and siblings they lost.

At the end, a shot of five of the boys dissolves into the elderly men they are today. Deeply moving.

The Windermere Children (BBC2)