One Life

Director: James Hawes (UK). Year of Release: 2023

1987, Maidenhead, England. An ageing man drives home, classical music blasting out from his car stereo. As he enters the house, he puts a bunch of yellow charity collecting tins on the table. He tells his wife that he has brought home a table. While she complains that they have no room for another table (looking inside the house, they have plenty of room for any number of tables), he retires to his cluttered study where files are piled up on top of each other.

Later, he goes for a swim in the outside swimming pool. As his body hits the water, memories surge through his head of a much younger version of himself in 1938 Czechoslovakia, just after Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland. Flashbacks tell us the story of how Nicky, then a 29-year old stockbroker, went to Prague to visit a friend who was connected to the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia. As Nicky arrives, his friend is making his way out.

Pretty soon, Nicky comes into conflict with the BCRC (let’s save some space and not write the full name each time). Firstly, he thinks that they are not ambitious enough and formulates plans to rescue many more people, especially Jews from occupation. Secondly, the BCRC is a political organisation, and is mainly concerned with rescuing activists – the people most likely to meet with immediate Nazi repression. Nicky wants to concentrate on saving children.

It is the nature of One Life, that Nicky’s point of view is accepted as being correct and the only logical thing to do. With hindsight, one could argue that everyone was at risk, so it made sense to try to save the most vulnerable. At the time, though, his suggestions discounted the very real danger faced by political activists and depended on separating children from their families. After all, if you are only going to save children, this means leaving their parents to stay and perish.

Posing this argument about priorities as a row between Nicky and the existing BCRC members also elides the pernicious role of the British government. Only children were saved, not because Nicky argued for it, but because this was government policy. Added to this, the rescuers must find £50 per child (over £4,000 in today’s money) and find someone willing to foster them. Even then, Britain refused entry for “problem” kids, a definition which included those who wet their beds.

Nicky also has problems with a local rabbi, who is worried that Jewish kids will be adopted by gentile parents. He is placated when Nicky reveals that although his parents converted to Christianity and he is a socialist agnostic, his grandparents were, in fact, Jewish Germans with the name Wertheim. The rabbi is suddenly ok with everything. You can’t accuse One Life of not raising interesting dilemmas, but every time it does, it seems unable to know how to deal with them.

The film regularly switches between 1938 and 1987, between Nicky desperately trying to save as many refugees as he can, and Nicholas self-effacingly not wanting to talk too much about his heroic past. On several occasions, the older Nicholas Winton says “This was never about me”, and says that just as much attention should be paid to his colleagues in BCRC who pre-deceased him. And yet a film, which is apparently there to revere him, pays absolutely no regard to this request.

One Life is prone both to White Saviourdom and the “Great Man” understanding of history – the presumption that all change is the result of the acts of single (Western) individuals, even though it looks like Winton viewed the world quite differently. As the older Nicholas beats himself up for “only” rescuing 669 children and asks himself if he couldn’t do more, the film encourages us to reject the very idea as ridiculous. In fact, it is a very legitimate question.

This is not to say that Winton should have organised even more trains (although it is unlikely that he organised any on his own), but that concentrating on what he achieved as an individual blurs out the social dynamics of what was happening. Both Nazi violence and Britain’s murderous immigration laws appear largely off screen – occasionally alluded to, but never seen as central to a plot about what one man could do. But Winton was restricted by exactly these government acts.

Given this focus, it is perhaps unsurprising that none of the refugees ever appears as a fully rounded character. They are pathetic urchins who snivel and look cutely grateful when Nicky offers them chocolate. But this is not their story, They exist mainly as proof of the main White character’s benevolence. Incidentally, when we later learn of the fate of some of the saved children, the film is very impressed that one is now a Lady – i.e. has achieved success by marrying a rich White man.

I don’t want to be too dismissive of One Life. It is more disappointing than bad. Any film today which reminds us that Nazis are bad, refugees are human beings, and we should oppose people who massacre children, is to be applauded. One Life has many important things to say, even if it says most of them very clumsily. It occasionally offers a glimpse of the truth, for example when it mentions in passing the obstructiveness of the British government or Nazi Crimes.

The fact remains, though, that the film is too fixated on the acts of one individual to be able to tell us a well-rounded story. Don’t get me wrong, Nicholas Winton was a heroic individual, but unless we look at why he was forced to act, we won’t gain many useful insights and history will be condemned to repeat itself. And a story whose heroes are Betsy Maxwell (wife of Robert, mother of Ghislaine) and Esther Rantzen is only ever going to so far. Close but no cigar.