Ruth Morlen & Lore Segal, Kindertransport Survivor Artists on Film | Film Screening & Conversation with Director Melissa Hacker

Focus of our next virtual event is the Kindertransport, a heroic rescue mission, which saved about 10,000 children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland from certain death, just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Starting on August 13, you can view the film My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports on your home device (until August 21).

To register, click here. 

Join film director Melissa Hacker in conversation with Rachel Stern about My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports. In the talk, Melissa will show a new short film on the Kindertransports, 256,000 miles from home, which travels with four Kindertransport survivors as they retrace the journey they took 80 years earlier, as unaccompanied child refugees.

In the nine months just prior to World War II close to 10,000 children were sent, without their parents, to the United Kingdom from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. These children were rescued by the Kindertransport movement. Most of the children never saw their parents again. Those courageous parents who had the strength to send their children off to an unknown fate soon boarded transports taking them to concentration camps. The story of the Kindertransports is an extraordinary piece of history – untold far too long. The children who lived the trauma and terror of being uprooted from secure homes tell compelling stories.

Watch the trailer here. 

The filmmaker Melissa Hacker’s mother, the Academy Award nominated costume designer Ruth Morley, neé Birnholz, (Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, The Hustler, The Miracle Worker, Tootsie, and many more classic American movies) fled Vienna on a Kindertransport in January 1939. She is a strong presence in the film talking about her experiences alongside other former child refugees, many of them women. Ruth and the writer Lore Segal, also a Kindertransport survivor from Vienna, remember the antisemitism of schoolmates and neighbors, the violence and their fears on November 9, 1938, the difficult decision their parents had to make to send them off into the unknown, and their lives in the United Kingdom. We learn about their postwar lives in North America, and hear from their children, the second generation. Hacker creates space for all to talk and reflect, making this film a moving and invaluable record of testimony.

Melissa Hacker is the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor from Vienna, Austria, and the Executive Director of the Kindertransport Association. Melissa is a filmmaker who made her directing debut with the documentary My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination and shown worldwide. Honors received For Ex Libris, A Life in Bookplates, Melissa’s current work in progress, include a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence award in Vienna, and residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, Playa, Willapa Bay AIR, Saltonstall, Millay, and the LABA Laboratory for Jewish Culture.

Artist Samson Schames and his wife Edith were also able to flee Nazi persecution to Great Britain: