REVIEW #15: ONE LIFE . . . CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

One Life
Director: James Hawes
Warner Bros. UK & Ireland, 2023

ONE LIFE . . .
CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

One Life is a reminder of what can be achieved when good people are determined to combat evil, even when the task seems humanly impossible. Moreover, those people, by their own admission, are all ordinary people. They had no special talent for the task that was set before them. They had a conscience and a stubborn belief in the capacity of good to triumph over evil. It has been a long time since a movie has moved me as deeply as this one did. How can anyone not be moved by the sight of parents putting their young children on trains to go and live in another country with strangers with no guarantees they would ever see them again? As a parent, I was devastated by this, even though I had taught a play based on the kinder transport programme to my Year 11’s and watched a documentary on it several times.

The heinous reality of these times being played out in the lives of these people, recapturing the tension and uncertainties of their lives (and with the backdrop of multiple wars being fought across the globe as we watched) will hit you very hard. Why don’t we learn? How many wars have to be fought, before we make different choices? How do human beings grow such a hatred for each other that they can destroy the lives of complete strangers? And how do we justify it? These are the questions that will crowd in upon you, as the credits begin to roll. You will need more than one handkerchief.

We have all seen, multiple times, the long-term effects of war, the way war is visited upon the next generations, as soldiers and families try to restore their lives to normality. There is even the guilt of survival that many have to deal with. This is what motivated Diane Samuels to write her play, Kindertransport, which so powerfully demonstrates that, not only the children themselves, but also their children are forever scarred by this experience, as they try to erase it from their memories and to build a new life on a foundation of death and destruction.

I was particularly moved by seeing the whole situation from the point of view of Nicholas Winton, both as a young man and also looking back on the ninth train that did not make it out of Czechoslovakia. He spent almost a lifetime wracked with guilt that those 250 children didn’t make it, along with the many others who needed help. Yet the human spirit triumphs, in the end, as it is made clear that the lives of so many of those children who were rescued bore the fruit of many future families as they carved out new lives in their new homeland.

Nevertheless, watching new wars wreak havoc in people’s lives around the planet, one is left to wonder what we have learnt as collective humanity,. We need to confront our human failings and be reminded that we also have the potential for great good . . . if we have the will and determination to call out evil and combat it. I highly recommend reliving this terrible time in our human history and grappling with the contradictory horror of our humanity and our capacity to act honourably for the greater good.