After spending the early afternoon attending the exhibit Auschwitz Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away, I needed a break.
I took a short walk from The Saunders Castle at Park Plaza to the Boch Center (formerly known as the Wang Theatre) and the Wilbur Theatre to buy tickets for Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and Emmylou Harris, respectively, before making my way to Cambridge.
Following a couple of hours of rest, I ventured back into Boston and made my way to the AMC Boston Common Theatre to watching a screening of One Life starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as Sir Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who helped save the lives of 669 children, most Jewish, from Czechoslovakia prior to the beginning of WWII.
Winton's acts were largely unknown until he made two appearances on the BBC show That's Life! in 1988. During his second appearance, the host asked audience members to stand up if they owed their lives to Winton and nearly the entire audience stood.
Of course, Winton did not act alone. Winton organized the passport paperwork while members of the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick were on the ground in Prague carrying out the logistics of bringing the children to safety whilst looking over their shoulders for Nazi soldiers. In One Life, this is acknowledged while Hopkins' portrayal of Winton is of someone who knows he did something important, but that act isn't about him. Winton lived a good, long life passing away in 2015 at the age of 106.
Unlike the despair I felt during and after my visit to the Auschwitz exhibit, One Life is a reminder that amid the evil there are always good people among us who do the right thing or at least try.
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