location

Durham Public Library
7 Maple Avenue
Durham, CT 06422
860-349-9544

Hours:
10:00am - 9:00pm * Monday through Thursday
10:00am - 5:00pm * Friday and Saturday

blog description

"You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians."--Monty Python


Saturday, May 18, 2013

PATRON PICKS -- MY KNEES WERE JUMPING (DVD)

Kassie's pick is My Knees Were Jumping:  Remembering the Kindertransport (DVD).  Directed by Melissa Hacker, narrated by Joanne Woodward.


About the movie:
During WWII, between 1938 and 1939, Allied forces launched a courageous rescue mission to save 10,000 children from certain death in the concentration camps.  These children were of Jewish or Gypsy descent or were otherwise marked as undesirable.  This documentary looks at what happened to these salvaged children.  To tell their often sad stories and chronicle the psychological effects of the traumatic events (although it was planned that the children would eventually be returned to their parents, over 90% never saw their parents again) the film uses interviews with survivors and rescuers, archival footage, and old photographs.  Though filmmaker Melissa Hacker keeps the focus on others, her own mother was one of the children saved from the camps.  (New York Times)

Kassie says:  A beautiful then and now, balancing the heroics of rescuing the children with the fact that less than 10% of parents survived.  Interviews with child survivors at a reunion.