The Windermere Children

Drama, 90 minutes, 2020

Written by Simon Block 

Directed by Michael Samuels 

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Reviewed bY SUE CARELESS

The Windermere Children is a moving biographical drama based on the true story of a project to rehabilitate child survivors of the Holocaust. 

In August 1945 three hundred Jewish children liberated from concentration camps were flown into a tiny English town in the Lake District. There they began new lives and found family in each other. 

The British philanthropist Leonard Montefiore had persuaded the British government to accept 1,000 displaced children aged eight to 16. The Home Office agreed on condition that the project was funded by the Jewish community. The Committee for the Care of Children from Concentration Camps selected 650 boys and 80 girls. In many cases they were the only surviving members of large families.

At the Calgarth estate on Lake Windermere, the children received no formal counselling. Instead, they were encouraged to swim in the lake, play football, ride bikes, paint and learn basic English. The plan was to bring them together in one place where they could be with others who’d been through what they’d been through, and talk about it among themselves if they wanted to. 

The project was designed to be a temporary scheme, running for only four months, after which the younger children would be placed in the care of foster families, and the older ones would live in hostels and prepare for work. After the devastation of the concentration camps, what could be accomplished in four short months? 

The film is devoid of sentimentality but there are no horrific flashbacks. It is certainly not as harrowing as Schindler’s List. And one scene that seems almost too good to be true did actually occur.  

Most of the Windermere children were teenagers. After all, not many little ones could survive in the concentration camps, although miraculously a few did. Young Polish actors portray these teens with remarkable aplomb. The film ratings program Rotten Tomatoes gave The Windermere Children 100% and the film is considered suitable for viewers 16 years and older.    

 There is also a powerful, one-hour companion documentary called The Windermere Children: In Their Own Words, also streaming on Amazon Prime.

The Windermere program is not as well known as the Kindertransport initiative, which moved nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories to Britain between 1938 and 1939. But it might well serve as an encouraging example for today as refugees and child soldiers from terrorist regimes around the world are being resettled.   

Anti-Semitism 

It is 75 years since Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated and anti-Semitism seems to be rearing its ugly head once again. 

A Polish court has ordered University of Ottawa professor Jan Grabowski and his co-editor, Barbara Engelking, to issue a public apology for including witness testimony in a book they edited about Poland during the Holocaust. Prof. Engelking is director of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research. The two academics are appealing the verdict. Their 2018 book Night Without End contradicts the official line that Poles were exclusively victims of wartime atrocities. If the ruling is upheld it could seriously impair scholarly research on the Holocaust in Poland.   TAP