Nina's Home delivers a powerful account of child survivors
In the midst of the chaos created during the liberation of Europe, the French government responded to an alarming number of orphaned and displaced children with several halfway houses scattered throughout the French countryside. Very seldom do we hear about the issues that the child survivors - and their caretakers - faced after the camps’ liberation. Accounts are more difficult to trace with children - many children were adopted by other families and lost their original names and the majority of records had disappeared during Nazi occupation.
Nina’s Home (France, 2005) was a film that looked at the children of the Holocaust and the difficult task of explaining the realities to an age group that could never possibly understand. Nina’s Home, performed in French with English subtitles, takes place at a “house of hope” run by a woman simply known as “Nina.” These houses of hope were opened in part by the French government in 1944 as US and allied forces moved through Europe and displaced children came out of hiding. They also acted as a halfway house for teenage Holocaust survivors in transition after the liberation of the concentration camps.
The film is a brave attempt to capture the struggles both for the children and teenagers, but also for the adults looking after them. The movie begins with Nina’s house of hope opening up and gathering children coming out of hiding. Food supply is very restricted and the house must rely on rations provided by the US government. The children still cling to their naïve belief that their parents will be coming for them. As news about the camps comes back from the Soviet armies crossing into Germany, Nina is thrust into the difficult task of explaining the genocide and trying to reconnect the children as information from the camps slowly filters through.
Halfway through the film, the house suddenly finds itself scrambling to find order as a group of teenage concentration camp survivors move in. The residents must struggle to find unity within the division of hidden children and survivors and secular, political Jews and practicing Jews. The difficulties of accommodating the needs of the Jewish camp survivors while not alienating the other children become very real as the new arrivals start to seek Kosher food, Shabbat ceremonies and rabbinic guidance in order to heal and bring back hope and meaning.
