In the early 1940's, as Hitler's plan for the "Final Solution" was in overdrive, some Jewish parents were able to place their children in "foster" care with non-Jewish families. Academy Award winning director Aviva Slesin was one of these children, who at the age of nine-months was smuggled in a suitcase to a family that kept her for more than two years.

The families that cared for these children would say that it was their child, unless neighbors became suspicious. In one case a child had to be moved 18 times to remain safe. The "rescuers" in this film accepted the children because they thought it was the right thing to do. They did so at great risk to their families, as laws were passed allowing that those guilty of aiding and abetting Jews would be shot, hanged or sent to concentration camps, to suffer the same fate as the Jews.

There are bitter lessons here about what courage, love and self-identity truly mean. After just a few years, a five-year-old, when reunited with her mother, told her to take her Jewish hands off of her as the mother tried to remove the lice covering the child's body. To survive, the child had to not think like a Jew but a Hitler Gentile. After a period of healing, it was comforting to hear the 85-year-old mother say that "now she loves me."

There's a lesson to be learned here about our own culture, and the society of these United States. You can see what 24-36 months of damage can do to a family's structure and one's self-image. If someone had to endure similar disruption to his or her family for 400 years of slavery, issuing an emancipation proclamation is not a cure, nor is 100 years of Jim Crow treatment. Ironically, it was the advent of WWII that led to the desegregation of the US military and other changes, and by 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed. Good things really can happen for seemingly the wrong reasons. Movies like this show that we can indeed learn from one another and that understanding our history (the complete story) is as important as reading, writing and arithmetic.