As part of the TRAVELS AND TRAVAILS series:

One Life

2023, 110 minutes

As implied in the title, if a person saves one life, they save the entire world. To that end, Nicholas Winton did his part and then some when he traveled to Czechoslovakia in 1938. The country was in the process of being dismantled by Germany, and Prague was filling with Jewish refugees trying to flee the Nazis. Winton was an unlikely hero, as he was a London stockbroker who had originally planned on a skiing holiday in Switzerland but was contacted by activists Doreen Warriner and Marie Schmolka, who showed him how dire conditions were in Prague. Winton went back to England and, with the help of his mother, badgered a resistant bureaucracy to issue visas for as many children as they could get out. The result was the British Kindertransport, which saved over six-hundred children before war was declared in September 1939.

In the film One Life, Johnny Flynn is cast as Winton in 1939, while Anthony Hopkins plays him fifty years later with a stiff upper lip that masks a haunted soul unwilling to take credit when so many others perished. Both actors deliver superb performances, as do Helena Bonham Carter and Romola Garai, who respectively play Winton’s formidable mother and the fearless Doreen Warriner.

At turns low key and frenetic, infuriating and inspiring, this is a film not to be missed.

Please Note--This film is RATED PG, with smoking, drinking, profanity, pigheaded bureaucrats, children in extreme peril, and all the foreboding that came with the step-by-step German conquest of Czechoslovakia.