One Life (The Movie)

 

One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins, is based on the true story of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, looking back on his efforts 50 years earlier, when, as a 29-year-old London stockbroker visiting German-occupied Czechoslovakia, he enabled over 600 refugee children (many of them Jews) to escape Nazi rule just before the beginning of World War II. The film's title refers to the Talmudic expression: Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world.

In both real life and in the movie, Nicholas Winton went to Prague shortly after the 1938 Munich Conference to work with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and took it upon himself to do something to save as many refugee children as possible. Actively supported by his mother (played by Helena Bonham Carter), Winton overcame bureaucratic obstacles, got visas for the refugees, collected conditions, and found foster families for the children in England.

Fifty unassuming years later, wanting to do something useful with his scrapbook from that experience, Winton contacts the media and ends up on a BBC show, That's Life, which surprises him by inviting some of the children he helped to save onto the show to meet him, which provides some of the most moving scenes in the film. In recognition of his efforts, Winton was knighted by the Queen, and this movie is yet another tribute to his accomplishment and the lives he saved.

In this era of renewed anti-semitism around the world (and here in the U.S.), this film functions as a warning of what happened when too much of the world was willing to appease evil and as an encouragement to individuals to stand up personally and collectively to the growing menace. Meanwhile, it also highlights the dangers which refugees everywhere experience. The asylum seekers on our southern border may not all be as endangered as those refugees stranded on Prague on the eve of war were, but many of them are in fact at risk of their lives and have needs that only concerted outside efforts can relieve. 

Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world.