This was quite a film.  Based on a true story, it’s the mostly unknown story of 300 children who survived the Nazi death camps and were sent to the English countryside for rehabilitation and treatment.  The caretakers were expecting small children, but the Windermere refugees were mostly teenage boys.

This was a wonderful movie.  Especially the ending.

Break out the tissues.

From PBS:  This is the stark, moving ultimately redemptive story of the bonds these children make with one another, and of how the friendships forged at Windermere become a lifeline to a fruitful future.

From Amazon:  One summer’s night in 1945, 300 children are in transit from Prague to the Lake District, a remote and picturesque corner of the English countryside. They are child survivors of the Nazi Holocaust that has all but wiped out Europe’s Jews – and for these particular children, their entire families too. They are some of the 1000 children the British government has granted refuge to, giving them a place where they can rehabilitate and grow strong after the devastation of the war. They carry only the clothes they wear and a few meagre possessions, along with the physical and psychological scars of all they have suffered. They do not know what awaits them in Britain and naturally they are fearful: they don’t speak English, and having spent many years living in death camps, have missed out on a proper education. But the children are also excited, for the war is over, and there is always hope that the future will be kinder to them than the past. 

90% of Europe’s Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.  Only 150,000 survived.  Thirteen million other European children lost parents in WWII.

What to do with these orphaned children became one of the largest humanitarian aid projects in history.

And here is a little piece of it.