“One Life” & An Army of the Ordinary

Now that One Life, Anthony Hopkins new movie that came out in March, has come to Prime Video, I have finally been able to watch it since its U.S. premiere was in the middle of radiation treatment for me. I was definitely not well enough to go to the theater and was happy to finally see it on my fire stick. As soon as I had seen ads for it during chemo, I knew it was a film that I wanted to see.

It was incredibly moving… watch with tissues. Hopkins did not disappoint in bringing to life the story of real-life Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 children during WWII. A self-deprecating man, Winton enlisted an army of ordinary people to rescue and take in the mostly Jewish, Czech children preceding and during the Nazi invasion.

“Save one life, save the world.”

Winton was an unassuming man who did not identify with his German Jewish ancestry. Rather he saw himself as a British Christian of European descent. I can relate.

This man’s family journey of identity reminds me of my own family. On my mother’s maternal side, I descend from German immigrants who came to the U.S. in 1845. During WWI my great grandfather changed our family’s ethnicity when asked publicly and recorded on the 1920 census as Dutch rather than German. He felt it was necessary to protect his business and family because of anti-German sentiment. He also wanted his family to be Americans. So, by the time that I asked my mom as a kid in the early 1980s, she was not very clear. She had said on her mother’s side that we were Dutch and a little German, but she wasn’t sure. Well, as it turns out from DNA and digging into family history, we are German descent with a small amount of Ashkenazi Jew from that line. My family did not know about any Jewish roots. So that was a surprise.

My mother told me that when she was a little girl in the 1930s and 1940s that the older generation refused to allow the children to learn German. Being from Cincinnati with a large population of German immigrants it was common to be bi-lingual. The elders spoke, read, and wrote in German as well as English. There were several German publications and vibrant German communities and establishments up until the first world war. But a collective decision was made to change that.

I think about my mother, born in 1937, had she been born in Europe she could have faced the fate of these children during the war – some saved and some not. What an incredibly moving story of a man who saw and did something – enlisting an army of volunteers to save 669 children. Definitely a film worth seeing.

If you’re interested in knowing more about Nicholas Winton, here is a good YouTube documentary. Apparently, he became an accidental celebrity in the UK later in life after it was discovered what he had quietly done. This family historian loved how one man did a part in saving the world.