Kind in twee werelden, drieluik over joodse oorlogspleegkinderen

Five Jewish children, two sisters, two brothers, and a girl are lodged with different foster families during World War II. This breaks up the original family, yet all children grow up in relative prosperity. The tragic element is that after the war they will appear to be the only ones to have survived. The five children are between 51 and 62 years old now and tell about their experiences, feelings and identity. The film situates them in their original world as well as in the world they have ended up in due to the war circumstances. Thus, we regularly switch from locations in Holland to Poland and Israel. These are the broad outlines of the story CHILD IN TWO WORLDS tells. A remarkable, though not illogical conclusion in the documentary is that it is not the period of occupation that has left the deepest wounds. It is rather the time after the war that has been experienced as the hardest. The search for one's roots, for one's own identity and faith, and the acceptance of the fact that a Jew is stigmatized for life due to the war. For example, one of the two sisters explains that for her the liberation came more than 15 years after 1945, when she came to Amsterdam and "could visit the synagogue as a Jew, openly." Not by the name she was given during the war and had kept afterwards at the insistence of her foster parents, but by her own, Jewish name. Willy Lindwer, maker of this documentary, was awarded the Emmy Award in 1988 for his film DE LAATSTE MAANDEN VAN ANNE FRANK, and for CHILD IN TWO WORLDS he received the Golden Calf at the Dutch Filmdays 1993 for the best long documentary.