Mark Jonathan Harris’ 2001 Oscar for Into the Arms of Strangers fights for shelf space with two previous statuettes, along with his five published children’s novels.

THE HOLOCAUST, like the Vietnam War, is a period in our recent past that has retained its hold on artists and historians. Recent television miniseries about Anne Frank’s life, the Wannsee Conference and the Nuremberg war crimes trials have refocused attention on the era. “The generation of [Holocaust] survivors is beginning to pass on,” says USC critical studies professor Michael Renov, “and it’s incumbent … not to let those experiences pass without continuing inquiry or memorialization.”
Mark Jonathan Harris is doing his part. His film The Long Way Home explored
the critical postwar period, detailing Holocaust survivors’ lives from the war’s end in 1945 to Israel’s founding three years later. The earliest films about the Holocaust had asked the question: How was this atrocity allowed to occur, especially in so civilized a country as Germany? These films usually ended at liberation. The Long Way Home examined the difficulties Jews faced in rebuilding their antebellum lives, and how those experiences led to the creation of the state of Israel.
The film was financed by Moriah Films, a division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a major Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles. Kate Amend, an adjunct professor in the USC cinema-television school and a longtime collaborator with Harris, edited the film. It was produced by Richard Trank, a USC alumnus and Moriah’s executive producer.
After the great success of that film, Harris was approached by producer Deborah Oppenheimer to make Into the Arms of Strangers. Oppenheimer’s mother was part of the Kindertransport, Britain’s humanitarian effort to bring 10,000 Jewish children from Austria, Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia to safety in 1938 – months before the outbreak of World War II.
Harris, who calls himself a secular Jew (“I think I represent most of the Jews in America, the majority that’s … defined by a cultural Jewish identity” rather than a religious one), initially resisted making a second film about the Holocaust. “I wasn’t sure if I had anything new to say about it,” he says. He also feared being typecast as a filmmaker: “My son sometimes jokes, ‘If it’s about genocide, call Dad.’”
But much of Harris’ work has focused on how people, especially children, survive tragedy. Harris grew up in a conservative, upper-middle-class home in
“USC has always been known as the ‘industry school,’ but arguably some of the strongest films produced here in the last 15 years have been documentaries.”
northeastern Pennsylvania – seemingly perfect, he recalls, but with cracks in the façade. “There was a lot of denial and repression in our family,” he says. To some extent, his work since has sought to unmask those silent experiences.
He studied history at Harvard University but came of political age in the 1960s. After a brief stint as a reporter on the police beat in Chicago, he was seduced by documentaries. One of his first films was Huelga! (1967), chronicling the first year of the Delano grape strike by members of Cesar Chavez’s farm workers union. The Redwoods, a film he made the next year for the Sierra Club, won the Oscar for Best Short Documentary.
In 1973, Harris moved with his wife to Los Angeles, and in 1983 he joined the cinema-television faculty at USC. He continued making documentaries, and helped establish an advanced documentary production course for graduate students in the mid-1980s.
“USC has always been known as the ‘industry school,’” he says, “but arguably some of the strongest films produced here in the last 15 years have been documentaries.”
Harris is also the award-winning author of five children’s novels, stories that address how young people deal with problems created by adults. That was what struck him about the stories of the Kindertransport.
“These were children who were prematurely forced to become adults,” Harris

HOLOCAUST, BEFORE AND AFTER
A group of Kinder prepare to leave Berlin in May 1939, from Into the Arms of Strangers.
says. “They were put in the quite unnatural position of saving adults.” He’s referring to children like Lore Segal, whose father told her the night before she left Vienna that she was the family’s salvation, and charged her to persuade the British to bring out her parents, her grandparents, her aunts and cousins too. “Before long I had a list of people whom I, at 10 years old, had promised to save from Hitler,” Segal recounts in the documentary. That interview “really drew me into the film,” Harris says. The children are the story, with the Holocaust as the tragic backdrop.
Into the Arms of Strangers is driven by interviews with about a dozen Kinder who relate intense feelings of loss and anxiety about being forced away from their parents at early ages. Even for those lucky enough to eventually be reunited with their families, the experience left scars. Kurt Fuchel recounts how he was “horrified” to learn his parents had survived the war by hiding in France and that he would have to rejoin them there after living most of his life in England. “My mother especially wanted to carry on where she’d left off. And a 16-year- old doesn’t like to be treated like a 7-year-old,” he says in the documentary.
Time magazine called it “an extraordinarily fine film,” adding, “this moving tribute
Refugees in a Displaced Persons Camp read Zionist posters in The Long Way Home.
has the power to summon us to our better selves.” It enjoyed a wide release by Warner Bros., and has become available on video and DVD.
Harris is currently at work on a new project, a film about child labor in developing countries, but he continues teaching documentary production to graduate students. “I’m sure I’m a better filmmaker for all the teaching I’ve done,” he says, referring both to classes and his supervision of about a hundred student documentaries.
For Harris, the experience of filmmaking retains its magic. “I’m always amazed that you can put a camera on your shoulder and people will allow you entry into their lives.”



Related Links

Grand Jewry Investigation

Documentary Power

Other Features

Thinking Gray & Free

Redesigning Lives