The Making of 'The Last Boat'

Filmmaker Alan Reich joins us to discuss his latest project, The Last Boat, which tells the story of the incredible rescue of seventy Jewish children out of Poland three days before the start of World War Two.

Filmmaker Alan Reich joins us to discuss his latest project, The Last Boat, which tells the story of the incredible rescue of seventy Jewish children and their two chaperones out of Poland on a British boat arriving in England three days before the start of World War Two. His father is one of the children who came to England on this kindertransport, but Alan did not know any details about this until much later in his life.

The Last Boat is a story of migration, identity and family secrets. Alan Reich draws on interviews with the surviving children and one of the chaperones, Rosi Ruben, who is 97 years old and still living in London. The documentary takes us back to the October 1938 deportation of the thousands of Jews from Germany and the ten months that they spent in the Polish frontier town of Zbaszyn. Along the way, the film asks what is the burden of inheritance for those that survived the War in England and the aftermath of catastrophic loss? For some of those rescued it is a chance to make sense of the fact that a large number of good-natured strangers decided to save their lives. How did this define their lives, and possibly the lives of their children?

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