'I was interested in the effect of separation on families with children," explains director Mark Jonathan Harris, in Dublin for the Doclands Festival, where the documentary was premiered on September 27th. "I wanted to look at how refugees were able to rebuild their lives. Nowadays, with the situation in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the problem of refugees is distressingly relevant. We all have to face this moral issue and take our own stance."
Harris won an Academy Award for his documentary The Long Way Home (about what happened to the survivors of the Nazi concentrations camps) in 1997. Deborah Oppenheimer, executive producer of the Drew Carey Show, saw The Long Way Home and contacted him with an idea for another documentary. "Deborah's mother, Sylva, had left Germany for England on a Kindertransport train when she was 11 years old. She had never felt able to talk to her family about her experiences, but after her death, Deborah found some letters that Sylva's parents had written to her, full of loving concern and parental advice."
Harris, who writes fiction for 12-13-year-olds, was reluctant to make another documentary about the Holocaust, but realised that this was actually more a story about parents and children: "It is about the two most traumatic experiences a child can have: the loss of home and the loss of family".
Harris read through many memoirs and watched many interviews at the Shoah Foundation of Visual History. He was struck by one of the latter, given by Ursula Rosenfeld: "She had not spoken about her experiences for many years. Having done the interview, she was able to sleep without having nightmares for the first time since childhood".
He chose a small panel of interviewees, including Rosenfeld: "We were moved, inspired and enriched by their stories. Despite their evident scars, they had overcome their pain to make something of their lives."