Critic Reviews

It would have been easy for The Windermere Children to tip over into sentimentality. ... And it would have been easier still to portray the carers (Tim McInnerny as Montefiore, Iain Glen as a sports coach, Romola Garai as an art therapist) as saviours. But they remained secondary to the excellent young cast, many of whom had never acted before. ... Writer Simon Block and director Michael Samuels gave us a sad and beautiful film.

The decision to introduce the real Jewish concentration camp survivors, now in their nineties, on whom those children's characters had been based was inspired, a sucker punch to dispel any faint notion that this was an embellishment. We had glimpsed the traumatised, brutalised teenagers these dignified elderly men had been. Even without it this drama had been extraordinary. ... Its strength was in its understatement, the orphans' experiences eked out delicately, the temptation to ramp things up for dramatic effect resisted.

There are shots of laughing children running through the idyllic landscapes, sentimental music blaring, and it teeters on being an implausibly saccharine resolution until the arrival of the real Windermere boys as they are now.

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 months at Windermere in the end prove their worth as evident in this film, impressively devoid of sentimentality, grim in its facts, and moving in its portrait of the determined effort to rescue these young lives