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The real story behind ‘One Life,’ the movie starring Anthony Hopkins as Nicholas Winton, who rescued Jewish children from the Nazis
(JTA) — In a 1988 episode of the British television show “That’s Life,” British stockbroker Nicholas Winton was invited to sit in the audience as host Esther Rantzen dramatically revealed to him that the entire crowd was composed of the Jewish children — now adults — he had saved during the Holocaust.
That tear-jerking clip periodically goes viral on social media, but now, Winton’s story is coming to bigger screens — in a dramatic film, “One Life,” where he is portrayed by two-time Academy Award-winning actor Anthony Hopkins.
Hopkins was the casting choice of Winton’s daughter, who died as it was being filmed, seven years after her father. Already, the movie has ignited criticism — and swift revision — over promotional materials that did not include language about the children’s Jewish identities. The full story about the film’s subject is even more complex, with connections to Ghislaine Maxwell, a gold ring, the Talmud and of course the tragic saga of European Jewry.
Winton’s role in that saga was hardly assured. Born to German-Jewish parents in London in 1909, Winton (originally “Wertheim”) was baptized into the Anglican Church, and as an adult, never subscribed to any religion.
Sir Nicholas Winton stands in front of the Tornado steam train that brought evacuees in 1939 to Liverpool Street railway station on September 4, 2009 in London, England. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
At 29, he was a stockbroker planning to ski in Switzerland with friends when his travel partner, schoolteacher Martin Blake called and said the trip was off — he was heading to Prague instead.
“I have a most interesting assignment and I need your help,” Winton recalled Blake saying. “Come as soon as you can. And don’t bother bringing your skis.”
Blake was working with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, an organization established to save Jews and other minority groups targeted by the Nazis in the recently-annexed Sudetenland.
But it was the appeal of a Czech Jewish social worker and activist, Marie Schmolka, that ultimately brought Winton into the Czech Kindertransport-inspired project organized by British university lecturer Doreen Warriner. Schmolka, who is not often mentioned in accounts of Winton’s efforts and is not portrayed in the movie, had visited the areas where refugees were concentrated and collected evidence to garner public support, pleading to foreign ambassadors based in Prague and to Jewish agencies abroad, hoping someone would take them in. But Britain would only take unaccompanied children.
For the first three weeks of Jan. 1939, Winton mostly worked out of a hotel in Prague, coordinating and collecting applications from parents seeking homes for their children outside of Czechoslovakia. He also took photographs of the children, which he later said was more persuasive for prospective families than a mere list of names.
Back in Britain, still working his job at the stock exchange, Winton and his assistants and his mother fundraised, collected or forged the children’s travel documents, and also placed advertisements in newspapers to find them foster homes.
On March 14, 1939, the day before Nazi Germany invaded the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia, the first of eight trains containing 699 children, mostly Jewish, headed to Britain. A ninth train was scheduled to depart on Sept. 3, but was halted — Germany had invaded Poland two days earlier, officially starting the war, and the borders were closed. None of the approximately 250 children on that train are known to have survived.
Early in the war, he worked for the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in France and in England during the London Blitz, later joining the Royal Air Force training pilots and documenting the destruction he saw with his photography. In the years after the war, he joined the International Refugee Organization, working on the repatriation of Nazi-looted goods.
His work with the children went unnoticed for decades. Then, in the late 1980s, Winton’s wife Grete Gjelstrup discovered a scrapbook in the attic with the children’s names and photos, as well as letters written by their parents.
“I suppose there are quite a number of things that husbands don’t tell their wives,” Winton told Matej Minac, who directed several films about his story.
Gjelstrup brought the book to Holocaust historian Elizabeth Maxwell, the wife of media magnate Robert Maxwell (also the parents of Ghislaine Maxwell, sentenced to prison over her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex abuse ring) who brought Winton’s story of saving the hundreds of children to the press, and eventually, to “That’s Life!” where he met some of the children he saved.
Nicholas Winton, then 105, receives the Order of White Lion, the highest order of the Czech Republic, from Czech President Milos Zeman during the Independence Day at Prague Castle, Oct. 28, 2014. (Matej Divizna/Getty Images)
Winton was nicknamed “the British Schindler” after German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. More than 6,000 children and grandchildren of the Czech Kindertransport owe their lives to Nicholas Winton, according to “One Life,” the 2014 book written by his daughter and biographer, Barbara Winton, which inspired the film. (The book was originally called “If It’s Not Impossible.”) Some of their descendants appear as extras in the “That’s Life!” scene.
Upon giving permission for a film adaptation of her book, Barbara Winton made one request of the project: cast Hopkins as her father.
Barbara Winton gave the filmmakers access to her father’s letters and other archival materials.
She died in September 2022, while “One Life” was still filming.
“One Life” is a reference to a paraphrased quote from the Mishnah: “Save one life, save the world,” which was inscribed in a gold ring presented to Winton in 1988 at a Holocaust conference organized by Elizabeth Maxwell at Oxford by some of the children he saved. Winton wore the ring for the rest of his life.
The gold ring presented to Nicholas Winton, inscribed with the phrase, “Save one life, save the world.” (Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for BFI)
The quote is also referenced in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List” in a scene where, at the end of the war, the Jews Schindler saved give him a gold ring made from their dental fillings inscribed with a nearly identical quote as a parting gift. The real ring, according to Jozef Gross, the jeweler who created it, did not have an inscription.
Controversy arose in early January when the film’s promotional materials in the United Kingdom failed to mention that the majority of the children in danger were Jewish. Instead, some marketing materials referred to the children as “Central European.”
After social media backlash, IMDb, the Warner Bros. U.K. website, and British theater chain Vue have all changed their summary of the film to read “predominantly Jewish.”
The National Portrait Gallery in London, which was running a series of portraits of children saved by Winton as an accompaniment to the film, also changed the text in its description.
“Our Gallery’s curatorial team made this update to the website copy to better reflect the identity of the individuals who traveled on the Kindertransport,” a representative from the National Portrait Gallery wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The original copy assumed that this was implicit, given the nature of the digital exhibition, however, following feedback, we felt it was important to clarify this.”
Helena Bonham Carter attends a photo call for “One Life,” out in January 2024, at The Rosewood Hotel on Nov. 30, 2023 in London. (Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Warner Bros)
The film has another Jewish angle to it as well — actress Helena Bonham Carter, who is of Jewish descent, plays Winton’s mother, Babette Wertheim.
“It was in my DNA to play this role because I come from Austrian Jewish heritage,” Bonham Carter told the Jewish News of London. “And on top of that, on both sides, both my grandparents helped a lot of Jewish people with visas to get out of Nazi Europe.”
Bonham Carter called Winton a hero, and said the most important part of the film was to make sense of him, “what made this man, this exceptional man, so modest, do the most extraordinary things,” she said.
Nicholas Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106.
Despite going decades without recognition for his heroism during the war, the later years of his life were filled with honors and awards. Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 for his efforts during the war, and he received the Order of the White Lion, the highest order from the Czech Republic in 2014. He even had a minor planet named after him.
Still, he insisted for years that his work was not heroic.
“I was never in any danger,” Winton told a British newspaper in 2011. “I took on a big task, but did it from the safety of my home in Hampstead.”
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Explosive Lawsuit Accuses Northwestern University of Reverse Racism in Hiring
Signs cover the fence at a pro-Palestinian encampment at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. on April 28, 2024. Photo: Max Herman via Reuters Connect.
Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law discriminated against white male applicants in its faculty hiring process, according to a new federal lawsuit citing as cause the US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that affirmative action in higher education is unconstitutional.
The sharply worded complaint, filed by Faculty, Alumni, and Opposed to Racial Preferences, opens a new front in the conservative movement’s attempt to proscribe what scholars and activists have described as an insidious pattern of reverse discrimination, which, while intending to assuage the lingering effects of racism in the US, has fostered a new “anti-white” bigotry that penalizes individual merit and undermines the spirit of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
Taking aim at “inclusive” hiring practices, the suit focuses on a component of affirmative action in higher education that is not widely known among the American public, such as “cluster hiring” — programs which aim to hire bunches of minority professors at a time — and “diversity recruitment” stipulations which all but guarantee that scores of white men, or individuals perceived as white, are denied employment in academia.
“For decades, left-wing faculty and administrators have been thumbing their noses at federal anti-discrimination statues and openly discriminating on account of race and sex when appointing professors,” court documents filed in the US District Court of Illinois say. “They do this by hiring women and racial minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men who have better credentials, better scholarship, and better teaching ability.”
It continues, “The practice, long known as ‘affirmative action,’ is firmly entrenched at institutions of higher learning and aggressively pushed by leftist ideologues on faculty-appointment committees and in university [diversity, equity, and inclusion] offices. But it is prohibited by federal law, which bans universities that accept federal funds from discriminating on account of race or sex in their hiring decisions.”
The complaint goes on to allege that high-level officials went to great lengths to conceal the law school’s allegedly discriminatory hiring practices, going as far as banning frank discussions about them on a digital messaging forum to avoid “litigation risk.” This code of silence, it argues, enabled the rejection of a job application submitted by Professor Eugene Volokh, a “renowned legal scholar” who has taught law for three decades and is cited in numerous opinions issued by the US Supreme Court. Volokh also clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever to serve on the country’s highest court.
“The idea of appointing Professor Volokh was supported by many of Northwestern’s public-law faculty,” the complaint says. “But the appointments committee that year was chaired by former dean Dan Rodriguez, who repeatedly pushed for race-based hirings as dean and refused to even invite Professor Volokh to interview. Because of Rodriguez’s intransigence, Professor Volokh’s candidacy was never even presented to the Northwestern faculty for a vote, while candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records were interviewed and received offers because of their preferred demographic characteristics.”
Volokh was “blocked” from teaching at the law school because he is white, the complaint continues, noting that another white candidate, Ernie Young, was denied a job despite holding a prestigious position at Duke Law School and publishing a mountain of legal scholarship in the thirty years since he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1993. It adds that Pritzker Law was allegedly so committed to excluding accomplished white men from its faculty that it hired Destiny Peery, a Black woman of color who was awarded a tenure-track position “even though the faculty at Northwestern was fully aware of her abysmal academic record as a student at the law school” and had “expressed concerns that Peery was unqualified for an academic appointment and incapable of producing serious scholarship.”
The complaint’s allegations stand to be controversial for its challenging a system that purports to redress the legacy of anti-Black discrimination and sexism and for seeking to apply civil rights laws to white men, a demographic that is described by leading progressives as “privileged.” However, non-white students, both male and female, have complained about the discriminatory effects of racial preferences, which has in practice punished intellectual achievement in pursuit of “social justice” and was even outlawed in California, a state where whites are a minority, decades before it was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
“Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is among the top law schools in the country, and we are proud of their outstanding faculty,” Northwestern University said on Wednesday, as reported by ABC News, in a statement responding to the lawsuit. “We intend to vigorously defend this case.”
On Friday, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, founder of higher education antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner that, in addition to undermining civil rights, racial preferences have fostered antisemitism on college campuses. Admissions and hiring committees packed with progressives ideologues, she said, not only prefer non-white candidates, they also aim to ensure that new hires are ideologically progressive — and, moreover, anti-Zionist. The effect of this, she explained, is that Jews in higher education, whom mainstream progressive ideology classifies as white, are also subject to discrimination, an issue The Algemeiner has covered extensively.
“Racial preferences pit racial identity against the meritocracy, and one of the reasons that Jews have became so prominent in academia is because it is a system that rewards talent, character, and grit. Jews tend to be well-educated and highly achieving, and when an institution’s primary concern is the quality of the individual as opposed to the color of his or her skin or perceived background, Jews excel,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “What the university stands for, academic integrity and excellence, are values that have lifted Jews up in America, and, in addition to being critical for advancing humanity, they have been one of the most important sources of our strength in this country.”
She continued, “However, when you impose academia criteria that have nothing to do with those values and nothing to do with academic integrity but everything to do with a political agenda that really at its core is discriminatory and hateful — and antisemitic — you make the university not just a hostile place for Jews but also a hostile place for learning.”
Rossman-Benjamin further argued that progressives have effortlessly “captured” higher education institutions over the past several decades and that their predominance in academia and the explosion of antisemitism on campuses across the US are directly linked.
“What’s so interesting is that the way you know that contemporary progress is not just a fraudulent and bankrupt ideology but an evil one, is that it produces antisemitism,” she continued. “Antisemitism is a bellwether of its malevolence. If it were positive and healthy, it would lift people up — but it isn’t. In fact, it is hurting them in the deepest ways.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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FBI Offers Reward for Info on Jewish Cemetery Vandalism in Cincinnati as Photos Reveal Extent of Damage
Toppled gravesites at the Covedale Cemetery Complex in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photo: Jacob Frankel
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for vandalizing two historic Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati, Ohio, this past week.
At least 176 gravesites were targeted at Tifereth Israel and Beth Hamedrash Hagadol cemeteries located in the Covedale Cemetery Complex sometime between June 25 and July 1. Although numerous signs at the entrances to the cemetery warn of surveillance cameras, none can be seen at the gravesite. There was also no apparent security presence during the incident.
Toppled and smashed gravesites were seen near several large gaps in the surrounding fence, which allowed vandals easy access to the cemetery.
A warning at the entrance to the Covedale Cemetery Complex, although no cameras are present. Photo: Jacob Frankel
The incident appeared to be motivated by antisemitism, although the specific gravesites damaged were attacked at random.
In the past few days, families have returned to identify the names on fallen gravesites. Stones were also placed on several of the vandalized headstones as a way to remember those who have passed away.
A shattered tombstone in the Covedale Cemetery Complex in Cincinnati, Ohio. Families are struggling to identify the names on graves. Photo: Jacob Frankel
“Due to the extensive damage and the historical nature of many of the gravestones, we have not yet been able to identify all the families affected by this act,” the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati said a statement. “Our community [is] heartbroken.”
US President Joe Biden condemned the antisemitic vandalism on X/Twitter.
“The vandalism of nearly 200 graves at two Jewish cemeteries near Cincinnati is despicable,” read a tweet from his official account. “This is antisemitism and it is vile. I condemn these acts and commit my administration to support investigators in holding those responsible accountable to the full extent of the law.”
Large tombstones were overturned in the Covedale Cemetery Complex. Photo: Jacob Frankel
According to the the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, numerous law enforcement agencies — including the FBI, Cincinnati Police Department, and the Green Township Police — are investigating the incident. Until the investigation concludes gravestones will remain overturned.
Gravestones remained overturned until the investigation has concluded. There was no police presence at the cemetery on Friday, July 5, 2024. Photo: Jacob Frankel
The Covedale Cemetery Complex features gravesites that date back to the 1800s, when Cincinnati had a large immigrant Jewish community. Dov Behr Manischewitz — founder of the Manischewitz company in 1888 — along with his wife, Natalie, are buried in Beth Hamedrash Hagadol Cemetery.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report in April showing antisemitic incidents in the US rose 140 percent last year, reaching an all-time high. Most of the outrages occurred after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, during the ensuing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
For those with information on the Covedale Cemetery Complex vandalism, the FBI has set-up a hotline at 513-421-4310.
The post FBI Offers Reward for Info on Jewish Cemetery Vandalism in Cincinnati as Photos Reveal Extent of Damage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Pro-Hamas Writers’ Coalition Celebrates Hezbollah Attacks on Israel
Smoke and fire rise in northern Israel following attacks from Lebanon, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, seen from the Israeli side on June 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) — a group of authors, novelists, journalists, and essayists opposed to Israel’s defensive military operations against the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza — celebrated Hezbollah drone and rocket launches against the Jewish state this week.
On Thursday, the group shared a news article from Al Jazeera discussing the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah’s launch of more than 200 missiles and drones into Israeli airspace from Lebanon. Beside the article, WAWOG posted a photo of the Hezbollah projectiles as they appeared to be intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system.
“Happy 4th of July,” the group wrote on X/Twitter, seemingly celebrating the assault on Israel.
Happy 4th of July. https://t.co/jPwvTTIqsi pic.twitter.com/qOqw9RsXvM
— Writers Against the War on Gaza (@wawog_now) July 4, 2024
WAWOG formed in October, weeks after Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that runs Gaza, launched the ongoing war against Israel by slaughtering over 1,200 people across the southern portion of the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, the organization issued a statement condemning Israel of attempting to “commit genocide” in Gaza and erecting an “apartheid state” in the West Bank. The letter rejected the notion that Hamas’ indiscriminate massacre of Israelis was “unprovoked,” arguing that it was a necessary act of self-defense on behalf of Palestinians. The fiery missive also dismissed the suggestion that Israel’s critics are motivated by antisemitism as “specious” at best.
“We stand with [Hamas’] anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation,” the letter read.
On its official website, the coalition of writers expresses support for Palestinian “right to armed resistance,” a slogan often parroted by defenders of Hamas’ terrorism against Israeli civilians. The organization claims to draw inspiration from so-called “heroes of the resistance” such as Souha Bechara, Basil al-Araj, and Georges Abdallah — internationally recognized terrorists with charges ranging from murder to armed attacks against the Jewish state. The organization also asserts that justice for Palestinians can only be achieved through the “complete dismantling of ‘Israel,’” an explicit call to eradicate the only Jewish state in the world and commence genocide against Jews.
WAWOG boasts an impressive roster of influential writers and artists including Roxanne Gay, George R.R. Martin, Ocean Vuong, and Susan Surandon.
In recent months, WAWOG has tried to rally the entire literary community against Israel, demanding writers declare allegiance to “Palestine” and vilifying authors who support Zionism. The organization recently spearheaded a protest against the PEN America World Voices Festival, citing its leaders’ unwillingness to condemn Israel for “genocide” and “apartheid.” After leftist activists, including WAWOG, successfully pressured many high-profile writers to drop out of the conference, the PEN America canceled its annual event.
PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel penned a letter lamenting the unwillingness of left-wing writers to tolerate nuanced or dissenting viewpoints on contentious topics such as the Israel-Hamas war.
“We share the anguish over the loss of life and devastation of the war. We are listening to our critics,” she wrote. “We now face a campaign that casts our struggle to reflect complexity, uphold our identity as a big tent organization, and show fealty to our principles as a moral abdication. The perspective that engaging with those who hold a different point of view constitutes an impermissible act of legitimization negates the very possibility of dialogue.”
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