Lost Children of Berlin

Product Details

Format : NTSC
Binding : VHS Tape
EAN : 9780767002820
Product Group : Video
Release Date : 1999-01-19
Studio : Sma Distribution
UPC : 733961161175

ASIN : 0767002822

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com

This touching documentary, in which students from the last Jewish school in Berlin to be shut down by the Gestapo are reunited in 1996, was produced in association with Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The purpose of the foundation is to videotape testimony of Holocaust survivors, and this documentary, which is hosted by actor Anthony Hopkins, is a microcosmic look at the foundation's ambitious mandate. The students from Gross Hamburgerstrasse School tell personal stories of how Nazi persecution escalated throughout the 1930s, eventually destroying what should have been their happy teenage years. Some of the students were able to escape the Holocaust by making their way to other countries, though some suffered terribly in concentration camps. Those from the school who survived generally thought they might be the only survivor among all their classmates, so it was particularly touching to hold the unprecedented reunion in this documentary. But despite some happy aspects of the reunion, there is a palpable sadness, such as when an elderly man who was a student at the school reads the list of classmates who perished. Each name is intoned, along with the name of the concentration camp where the student was killed. This is an intelligent and ultimately hopeful look at one of history's greatest tragedies. --Robert J. McNamara

Customer Reviews

THUMBS UP (2003-01-04)

This was an enlightening film...If this topic interests you, you should check out the critically acclaimed books of Dorit B. Whiteman (she is a Holocaust survivor herself as well as a pysychologist): "The Uprooted", a classic which insightfully examines how some Jews (including many Kindertransport members) managed to miraculously escape Nazi occupied countries and describes the emotional aftermaths of their ordeals, and the more recent "Escape Via Siberia", which tells the dramatic story of a Polish boy who surived exile in Siberia and joined the only Russian Kindertransport. ...

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