OxfordPress.com

Grade: B+

Verdict: Stories you'll never forget.

Details: A documentary directed by Mark Jonathan Harris. Rated PG for difficult subject matter, including concentration camp footage. Two hours, 2 minutes.

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Review: Some 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust. The number might've been 10,000 higher if it hadn't been for the Kindertransport. In the last months of 1939, before war was officially declared, about 10,000 children — Jewish and otherwise — were bundled off from their homes in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia and sent to safety in Britain. There they stayed in hostels and foster homes until the war was over and some — hardly most — were reunited with their families.

This phenomenal yet little-known slice of human kindness has been chronicled in the excellent documentary, “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.”

Written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, who made the similarly fine “The Long Walk Home,” “Strangers” offers the usual documentary blend of archival footage, tattered family photos, erudite narration (by Dame Judi Dench) and talking heads. But if the form is familiar, the subject matter most definitely is not. And even the so-called “familiar” images still have an astonishing power — a synagogue in flames, a cluster of swastika-emblazoned balloons or Hitler himself, presiding over a nation's hellish free-fall into horror.

Harris first treats us to a shorthand history of the rise of the Third Reich — especially as it affected the children of German-occupied territories. They were slowly, shrewdly culled from the mainstream, barred from schools, parks, swimming pools. One of the dozen or so survivors interviewed for the film recalls how no one showed up for her birthday party. “It was my first indication that I was ostracized. That I was different.”

The Nazis, almost mockingly, made it clear that those who felt “different” were welcome to leave. The problem, however, was finding a country that would take them.

The British, to their everlasting credit, responded with the sort of heroism and moral conscience that makes you choke up when you hear “God Save the Queen” on the soundtrack. The United States, alas, acted shamefully. Congress voted against supporting the Kindertransport on the grounds that “accepting children without their parents was contrary to the laws of God.”

It sounds like a sick joke.

So Britain stepped up to the plate alone and for nine months welcomed about 300 children every week. Not all their stories are happily-ever-after fairy tales. One woman recalls being treated like a maid by her foster family. Another remembers that “blue-eyed blond girls between the ages of 3 and 7” were the most popular adoptees. Still another ruefully admits that he was relocated several times. “None of them [the foster families] could stand me for very long. Nonetheless they had the grace to take in a Jewish child.” Some problems, by contrast, arose out of a surplus of happiness. One boy — now a graying senior citizen — bonded firmly with his foster family. So much so that when his real parents arrived — having miraculously survived the concentration camps — he felt torn between two loving homes.

Initially, you think you'll become inured to the survivors' testimonies. Surprisingly, the opposite is true. Their simple, sometimes harrowing, stories become more involving as the movie progresses.

Perhaps that's because “Into the Arms of Strangers” is more than a Holocaust story. It's the story of childhood lost and only partially regained. Of a courageous small nation, already beleaguered by Hitler's cancerous ambitions, that still managed to do the right thing. Of parents who embraced their own doom but insisted their children live and chose the only route open to them — relying, as outcasts of every stripe eventually must, on the kindness of strangers.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service