One life's relevance to today

One Life is a historic story retold for today audience, highlighting the response of individuals, families and leaders. Krish Kandiah ponders what it can teach us about sanctuary.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

An old man wearing a suit and tie sits in a TV audience as people stand around him.

Anthony Hopkins plays Nicholas Winton.

BBC Film.

There’s an elderly man with thick-rimmed glasses sitting in the studio audience of a popular 1980s television programme. The camera lingers on him as the presenter on the stage, in her signature blue dress, opens up a scrapbook detailing a hitherto unknown mission at the beginning of the second world war that rescued 639 Jewish children from the Nazi genocide.

The man in the audience was the force behind this rescue mission, and the camera is focussed on him because there’s about to be one of the best television moments in history. Unbeknown to him, he is sitting next to a lady whose life he once saved. As Esther Rantzen reveals the connection, a look of shock, wonder and amazement crosses his face.

The story that was kept secret for nearly a lifetime was broken in front of a live television audience of millions. I’ve watched the recording a hundred times; it never fails to make me tear up. I’ve spoken to people who were on the production team of that show who say that this programme was the highlight of their careers. It was a truly brilliant piece of television.

40 years later and I am sat in the Royal Festival Hall next to another elderly gentleman. We have just watched Anthony Hopkin’s incredible performance as Nicholas Winton, that man in the studio, in the new movie One Life. The director of the movie, James Hawes, makes his way to the front and asks if there is anyone in the audience who is alive today because of Nicholas Winton. The elderly gentleman beside me stands along with hundreds of others. Some of those standing were on the Kindertransport in 1939. Others were their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

It was an immense privilege to spend some time with these survivors. Many had their original identity photographs with them. It was an emotional evening as I heard stories from those who remembered boarding the trains in Czechoslovakia in 1939 and saying goodbye to their parents for the last time.

Many of the Kindertransport descendants had met Nicholas Winton personally before he died and were astounded by Hopkin’s ability to capture his likeness and his story.

I never met him myself, but as I watched One Life, I felt like I was in the room with him. The audience meets him as a young man discovering the terrible situation for Jews in Europe and deciding to take action. We journey through the many obstacles to the rescue mission. At first nobody would take in the Jewish children because of the misconception that migrants would overwhelm local services at a difficult time for the country. Yet through savvy use of media, great administration and pure unrelenting persistence, Winton and his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) were able to get a system running that meant hundreds of temporary foster parents not only came forward but paid for the privilege of helping to save the lives of these children.

As many of the children lost their families to the horrors of the gas chambers and could not be reunited with their families, a large number were adopted by their foster carers and grew up in the UK. Some went on to greatness, others lived quiet lives of service. The 91-year-old man who sat next to me at the premiere had dedicated his life to the church and also to making sure the next generation didn’t forget either the horrors of the holocaust, or the hospitality of ordinary people.

One Life is a deeply inspirational film. As I reflected afterwards, I couldn’t help but draw parallels with the situation in the world I live in now with terrible wars that are in full swing. I wondered what Nicholas Winton would do for the children being slaughtered today. What would a modern equivalent of the Kindertransport look like? Who could step forward to inspire our nation once again to offer sanctuary, protection and hope to our world’s most vulnerable children?

https://youtu.be/8u1UAc7GKek

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Kirsh Kandiah reports from the One Life premiere.

Review

Art

Culture

23 July 2024

5 min read

The collective effervescence of sport’s congregation

Art captures how sport and religion are entwined throughout history.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

An impressionist painting of runners bunched together on the bend of a track.

Robert Delaunay's Coureurs.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2022 I had the opportunity to attend the launch of Football and Religion: Tales of Hope, Passion & Play, a mixed media exhibition with works by Ed Merlin Murray, at the Aga Khan Centre Gallery. The exhibition explored the relationship between football and religion and how the two are often connected, with players praying on the pitch and fans observing religious rituals in tandem. The exhibition also examined football’s ability to champion social causes, promote marginalised voices, and create opportunities for inclusion and diversity

The accompanying historical exhibits also revealed important collaborations with a variety of organisations and specialists in the field of football and religion. Among the archive material shown, books such as Thank God for Football! reveal that nearly one third of the clubs that have played in the English FA Premier League owe their existence to a church, while Four Four Jew: Football, fans and faith and Does Your Rabbi Know You Are Here? uncover a hidden history of Jewish involvement in English football.

In an associated essay, ‘Football Is More Than A Secular Religion’, Dr Mark Doidge, Principal Research Fellow in the School of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Brighton, noted: “Sport and religion are intimately entwined throughout history. Ancient Greek funerary games were seen as the most fitting way of honouring the death of heroes. The Olympics were held in honour of Zeus, which is why the ancient site of Olympia is home to sanctuaries, temples, and sports facilities.”

_{Sport metamorphosed into a practice of effort, competition, and record-setting, sanctioned by artists in works that reinforced the cult of sporting heroes, relayed by the press.}

While not focusing specifically on religion, as did the Aga Khan Centre exhibition, exhibitions organised for the Paris 2024 Olympics are also exploring stories of sport as culture, impacting on gender, class, race, representation, celebrity, science, and art.

En Jeu! Artists and Sport (1870-1930) at Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, builds up a portrait of the society of the second half of the nineteenth century, which gradually took pleasure in taking advantage of its free time to pursue sporting and leisure activities on land or water. Ranging from Impressionism to Cubism, the exhibition shows how sport and sportspeople were made into icons of modernity and the avant-garde. It also explores the ethical challenges and aesthetic aspects of how sports were perceived by artists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas and examines the metaphorical meanings of the heroic figure of the artist as a sportsperson, characterized by determination, stamina and a form of resistance.

The changing social codes of sporting circles, where venues became theatres of physical prowess, are also examined. Sport metamorphosed into a practice of effort, competition, and record-setting, sanctioned by artists in works that reinforced the cult of sporting heroes, relayed by the press. Artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac identified with the qualities of determination and endurance of these sportspeople who sought to surpass themselves.

Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores how the modernist culture of Paris shaped the future of sport and the Olympic Games as we know and love it today. The exhibition looks at a pivotal moment when traditions and trailblazers collided, fusing the Olympics’ classical legacy with the European avant-garde spirit. Paris 1924 was a breakthrough that forever changed attitudes towards sporting achievement and celebrity, as well as body image and identity, nationalism and class, race and gender.

The fusion of modern Parisian cultural style with the Olympics’ classical inheritance gave the event a striking visual impact. Curators Caroline Vout, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge and Professor Chris Young, Head of the School of Arts and Humanities University of Cambridge say: “The exhibition explores the look and feel of Paris 1924 as trailblazing and traditional, local and global, classical and contemporary. It brings together painting, sculpture, film, fashion, photography, posters and letters.”

The exhibition also highlights the extraordinary achievements of the Cambridge University students who won no fewer than 11 Olympic medals for Great Britain that year, including the sprinter Harold Abrahams whose story inspired the award-winning film Chariots of Fire.

_{Regular congregation at a sacred space to perform collective rituals creates a ‘collective effervescence’...}

Mark Doidge

Paris 1924-2024: the Olympic Games, a mirror of societies at the Shoah Memorial in Paris highlights the issue of prejudice and discrimination, past and present by drawing on a century of the Olympic Games. Bringing together emblematic images of these sporting events, archive documents, films, extracts from the sporting press and personal accounts, the exhibition reveals the Games to be marked by friendship and excellence, but also as capable of being used for political ends which often reflect deep-seated trends in our societies. The exhibition pays particular attention to the Berlin Olympic Games organised by Nazi Germany in 1936 and to the athletes interned at Drancy during the Second World War. It also shows that the values of Olympism can be a real lever in the fight against racism and anti-Semitism and for a better society.

Taken together, these exhibitions highlight the development of sport as a culture in ways that have a wide impact on society, including religion. In his essay, Mark Doidge highlights the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim who ‘identified that the key social components of religion are the foundational components of society’. Doidge notes that “Regular congregation at a sacred space to perform collective rituals creates a ‘collective effervescence’ where the individuals become a community and identify themselves as such”. He also notes the similarities with sport which provides a “way of understanding who we are - who we socialise with, how we see other people, and the ways in which we interact with others” – and which is, like life, “about rivalries and competition, solidarity and teamwork, division, and unity”.

These similarities can lead some to privilege sport over religion but Doidge argues that sport “should recognise that religion is a key part of many people’s identity and sense of self, and work hard to be inclusive for all”.

En Jeu! Artists and Sport (1870-1930), 4 April to September 2024, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body, 19 July to 3 November 2024, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Paris 1924-2024: the Olympic Games, mirror of societies, 6 May to 9 June 2024, The Shoah Memorial, Paris.