The Windermere Children, review: Drama exercises such raw emotional power that it’s impossible to get through it without crying

The poignant story about a group of child survivors of the Holocaust rehabilitated in the UK was broadcast on Holocaust Memorial Day, in a spirit of ‘never again’. If only.

It is impossible to get through the hour and a half or so of The Windermere Children (BBC2) without crying. It is rare indeed to find a television dramatisation, even one concerned, as here, with the Holocaust, that exercises such a raw emotional power. The very first lines, voiced over the titles, give you notice of what follows: “They tore me from my father’s arm and took me away. This moment I will never, ever forget.”

In 1945, shortly after the end of the Second World War, the British government agreed to take some 732 refugee Jewish children, survivors of the Nazis’ extermination camps (and a tiny fraction of those murdered in those death factories). About 300, from toddlers to adolescents, were billeted in some huts near Windermere. There, under the solicitous care of guardians and a rabbi (played by Thomas Kretschmann, Tim McInnerney, and Konstantin Frank with sensitivity), as well as an art therapy teacher, played by Romola Garai, they find themselves rehabilitated, from starving, terrified children to normality, in a remarkable few months.

The journey from dehumanisation to depersonalisation is forbidding. One boy, asked his name, pulls his sleeve up to reveal his tattoo and answers: “B7608”. The youngest girls sleep on the floor, out of habit, huddled together rather than in their allocated beds. When the children, now de-loused, sit down in the hall for their first English meal, they grab the bread rolls and scamper as fast as they can back to their rooms, chairs and tables flying, scoffing the precious meal on the run. Or else they stash it for fear it will be the last food they will see for a while – just as they did with the half rotting scraps they were chucked in Chelmno, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt.

In dialogue, you hear what I suspect to be the authentic testimony of actual survivors. It’s hard to take: “The reason I am still alive is because I was strong enough to take bread from someone who was too weak to eat it.” Or: “A favourite game of the guards was to put ground-up glass in our soup, so we bled to death from within.”

The black humour is almost as searing. When a few boys realise that they were all on the same train from Buchenwald, one jokes to his friend: “First or second class?” The reality, one learns, is that they had to eat corpses to keep going.

The Windermere Children combines the production values and visual period charm of a 1940s Miss Marple mystery with the most graphic horror flick. Twee images of old Austins and ladies in twin sets and pearls, and the sweeping beautiful landscapes are juxtaposed with genocide. The horrific images are confined and modulated into the freestyle paintings the kids are encouraged to create. They are invariably themed on death and imprisonment; arresting and deeply affecting. We observe their night terrors, and can only imagine what painful memories their subconscious minds are trying to process.

Eventually, the kids’ transition at Windermere is complete; they are speaking English, playing football, going to the cinema, and ready to start their new lives, most settling in Britain. Now happier, we see a few dozen of them staring into the lake, then the image dissolves and revealed are five survivors, the real Windermere Children who have grown old, some 75 years on from their liberation: Arek Hersh MBE; Chaim “Harry” Olmer; Sir Ben Helfgott; Schmuel “Sam” Laskier; Icek “Ike” Alterman.

If the drama had a fault, it was its slightly self-congratulatory aspect. There’s the odd bit of hostility, like idiot lads in Kendal doing the Nazi salute, but otherwise the British are wholesome and kind. There is certainly not enough acknowledgement of the many more thousands of children, and adults for that matter, who the British refused asylum to, either for the UK itself or for Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, we know only too well the cruel refusal of asylum to a new generation of homeless, stateless, frightened children in filthy camps. We also understand a little more about why so many Jewish people now feel so anxious about the recrudescence of antisemitism in parts of British society. The Windermere Children was broadcast on Holocaust Memorial Day, in a spirit of “never again”. If only.