Desperate Journey tells the extraordinary story of Freddie Knoller’s survival with the sense of entertainment needed to reach audiences of all ages
December 4, 2025 20:06
With the passing of the inspirational Holocaust survivor and educator Manfred Goldberg last month, the question of how to keep alive the memories of the darkest chapter in human history becomes more important than ever.
Living witnesses to the Shoah speak of their experience in a way no one else can.
In their place, now, as the decades pass, historians and educationalists strive to honour the memory of the six million who died and the survivors, so that the world will never forget.
Hollywood too has a crucial role, reaching mass audiences and particularly younger generations with mainstream films that make the unimaginable horrors accessible.
How to tell those stories has changed over time. When Judgement At Nuremberg was released in 1961, viewers hardly needed to be reminded about the crimes against humanity that had so shocked the world when revealed little more than a decade earlier.
Such historical awareness can no longer be assumed. Some might accuse the makers of the new film Nuremberg – starring Russell Crowe as Goering – of spoonfeeding the audience in a straightforward if simplified account of the trial.
But knowledge must never be taken for granted. Remember Hitler’s warning in 1939: “Who speaks today of the Armenians?” Survey after survey shows how once commonplace facts are being forgotten. Even the figure of six million no longer has the certain power to evoke the evil and tragedy of the Shoah that it once held, at least among younger generations.
So let us welcome a new film that takes the story of a survivor whose memory is cherished, just like Manfred Goldberg, and makes it immediate and relevant to today’s viewers.
Freddie Knoller died in 2022, aged 101, and leaves behind a towering legacy: the joy he brought to all who knew him, and the immense work he accomplished in his later years with the Holocaust Education Trust to tell the world about what he experienced and witnessed as a youth.
Adapted from Knoller’s memoir of Nazi-occupied Europe, Desperate Journey is splattered with the violence and cruelty that you might expect.
But interwoven with those traumatic moments is a deeply engrossing and even entertaining account of a young man’s adventures.
For me it had a very personal resonance: Freddie’s story begins in Vienna in 1938, when he flees after the Anschluss, finding refuge in Antwerp before attempting to make his way to England following the outbreak of war.
My father had almost exactly the same name, spelt Fredi. He escaped from the Austrian capital at the same time as Knoller, and spent the next two years in Antwerp.
Amid the vast, incomprehensible scale of the attempted genocide of Europe’s Jews, the tales are so common, and yet each one is unique, and the parallels end there.
My father made it to England via one of the last boats out of Dunkirk.
Freddie Knoller found his way to Paris and eked out an existence amid the nightclubs and brothels of the red light district. He earned his keep luring Nazi troops to pay for their evening’s companion.
It is in this chapter that the film takes an unpredictable turn, with Cabaret-style musical numbers and even a little good old-fashioned titillation.
Some may bristle at the change of mood, but so what? Better to rattle staid notions of decorum than stay confined to the high art enclave and risk losing the attention of the next generation.
One particular line in the script stands out: “The world doesn’t need more pain. We need to grow. And to learn.”
I’d urge you to embrace Desperate Journey as a five-star history lesson with the immediacy to reach audiences of all ages in our worryingly under-informed era.
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