In 1938, twenty-nine-year-old British stockbroker Nicholas Winton (played by Rupert Graves) began to organize an effort to have British families adopt Jewish children in Czechoslovakia as a part of what was called the kindertransport, which involved a total of some 10,000 children from Austria as well as Germany. Not all the “endangered children” were hustled out of Czechoslovakia by train to England, but 669 were. All My Loved Ones (Vsichni moji blízcí), dedicated to Winton, is about one such adoptee, David Silberstein (played by Brano Holicek), who provides occasional voiceovers during the film. Most of the film, however, focuses on family life of the Jewish community in Prague before David’s departure. Similar to the Redlichs in Nowhere in Africa, most of the Silbersteins did not practice Judaism and considered themselves Czech. Unprepared for the horrors to come, none of the rest of the family survived the Holocaust. Through newsreels, the film features the 1938 Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia, Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland, and the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia. Personal tragedies unfold because of the larger political situation. At the beginning of the film, in the year 1938, a landlord (played by Jirí Menzel) sells the estate where the Silbersteins are living to physician Dr. Jakob Silberstein (played by Josef Abrhám) for peanuts, yet the family does not get the hint that all Jews should get out. Jakob’s brother Samuel, an accomplished violinist (played by Jiri Bartoska) wants to marry a non-Jewish woman; his rabbi brother Leo (played by Krzysztof Kolberger) is not happy about the prospect of outmarriage but consents, only to have the Gentile father veto the marriage because the news tells him that the wife of a Jew almost certainly would be rounded up by the Nazis and die. Samuel, whose concerts were canceled by the Nazis, naïvely rejects the explanation and commits suicide. Jakob arranges to have his son David go on the kindertransport, and he also pays a friend $10,000 Czech dollars to arrange a passport for himself and his wife Irma (played by Libuse Safránková), but the friend absconds from the country with the money. Robert (played by Andrzej Deskur), fiancé of the Silberstein’s daughter Hedvika (played by Tereza Brodská), takes off for Palestine, another option foolishly rejected by the others, who see the soil there as a desert. Young David, meanwhile, has a sweetheart, Sosa (played by Lucia Culkova); the ten year olds even have a mock secret two-person wedding one day. David therefore counts on escaping to England with her on the same train. Unfortunately, Sosa is booked on a later train, scheduled to depart September 1, 1939, but alas that train did not leave, as Britain declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland on that day. The film is directed by Metej Minac, who is the son of a child who was on the kindertransport and is based on his mother’s recollections. In 1998, when Winton was ninety-two years old, President Vaclav Havel honored him with a high award. Videos of a 1998 reunion involving Winton and some of the surviving children bookend the film, an event for which Winton, who kept his role a secret for many years, forgot to bring along a handkerchief that he did not realize that he would need to dry his eyes. We await a similar feature film about Operation Babylift, in which over 2,000 out of an estimated 70,000 Vietnamese young orphans were flown on several flights to adopting families in Australia, the United States, and other countries from April 3, 1975, under a similar pretext. Meanwhile, the Political Film Society has nominated All My Loved Onesfor best exposé of 2003. MH