Die Kinder der Villa Emma (2016)

This is the true-story-based account of a group of Jewish children who set out from Vienna in the spring of 1941, with the help of the Children and Youth Aliyah founded by Recha Freier, to flee to Palestine. Among them are 14-year-old Viennese Betty Liebling and 17-year-old Tilla Nagler, who is from Berlin. Betty leaves behind in Vienna her father, who hopes to make his way to America, her grandmother, and her best friend Paula. Their escape first takes them across the border south of Graz to Zagreb, where they cannot stay long because the German Wehrmacht invades in April 1941. After Georg, one of the group’s escorts, is shot dead while attempting a rescue, Josko and Helga—whose husband is waiting for her in Palestine—have to continue on with the group alone. On the journey, the resourceful survivor Marco Schoky joins the children’s transport. The escape takes them onward to Slovenia, to a dilapidated hunting lodge in Lesno brdo. But the Nazis are closing in here too, so the group flees on to Nonantola in Italy’s Po Valley, where an empty villa, Villa Emma, was rented by a Jewish aid organization in July 1942. A second group, consisting of forty Jewish children and young people from Croatia, is also housed there. In Nonantola, Betty experiences her first love with Salomon, a 17-year-old from Bosnia. After Benito Mussolini is ousted in July 1943, the National Socialists occupy this region too, and the residents of Nonantola hide the children of Villa Emma from the Nazis. The escape then continues to Switzerland. Salomon, who has tuberculosis, has to be left behind. The Nazis take him to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he dies. Everyone else in the group survives, but hardly anyone in their families does.