Coming to HBO this Monday, April 8: 50 CHILDREN: THE RESCUE MISSION OF MR & MRS KRAUS
Steven Pressman’s film about a Jewish American couple’s heroic efforts has previously screened, under its earlier title, TO SAVE A LIFE, as part of the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival’s New Filmmaker Weekend. It makes its official debut via HBO Documentary Films, in commemoration of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus were an affluent, secular Jewish couple from Philadelphia who managed to navigate a series of bureaucratic hurdles to rescue fifty Jewish children from Austria in the Spring of 1939. Narration by Alan Alda and Eleanor’s enacted journal entries detail the particulars, aided by interviews with Kraus offspring and the surviving rescued children: In the early days of the European conflict, before America was at war, Jews were permitted to leave Nazi controlled areas – but rampant anti-Semitism meant that they typically had few options for asylum, with strict quotas preventing many from entering the US and other European nations. Hearing of the Kindertransport that saved many Jewish children’s lives, the Krauses wondered if they could help establish foster families for other Jewish youths. Learning that some visas issued to Austrians went unclaimed after the Anschluss, they hatched a plan to allot those visas to fifty children, provided they could secure foster families in Philadelphia and the permission of children’s parents in Vienna, who they visited in the heart of Nazi territory, at the risk of their own safety – in the end saving not only the children, but in many cases later enabling their parents to join them, avoiding the Holocaust. The story will be perhaps most revelatory for some audiences in its underlining of how many more lives could have been saved were it not for the discriminatory policies that literally left Jewish people with nowhere to go. Despite being largely conventional in approach and structure, and drowning in narration and journal recitals, Pressman’s film is often affecting, telling a little-known story of determination, samaritanship, and sacrifice in more than challenging circumstances.
what (not) to doc 