Description: Inside the hospital, children with various illnesses and disabilities are seen having their hair cut. Scenes outside the hospital but within its grounds show, children sat in wheelchairs. Other boys are seen in wheeled hospital beds and at school desks all of which have been placed outside on a tarmaced area, some of the boys are reading and writing. Some boys in wheelchairs are seen being lifted into back of a bus by uniformed men before the bus drives away. Other children in wheelchairs are seen being pushed around the hospital grounds. Inside the hospital children are seen having their hair cut, engaging in play and attending school lessons. A mixed group of children watch a model railway in action and some bedridden girls play with dolls and soft toys. The school lessons are very varied. Some boys wire batteries to various electrical devices. In a mathematics lesson, a boy with manual dexterity problems demonstrates how he draws a straight line with a rule. In an art class clay children model with clay, paint pots, and use a potter's wheel. There are also views of an electronics class, and a woodwork class. In an experiment outside pupils and a teacher use an electric vacuum cleaner as a propulsion device and make it spin in rotation. Some other boys outside in wheelchairs use a parabolic concave solar mirror to create a flame. One boy looks at his distorted upside down reflection in the mirror. Some younger children in a schoolroom sit around a table playing a visual matching educational game. They also use a sandpit, woodworking tools, a potter's wheel, and weighing scales. One young girl is filmed walking tentatively to her desk with her legs in callipers and pulling herself into her chair. The film concludes with an amateur fiction story utilising some of the child patients as actors. One of the boys learns magic from a spell book and using his wand makes his friends disappear and reappear. He is reprimanded by his teacher but uses the wand to make him also disappear. The boy mistakenly drops the wand however leading himself to disappear.
Comments
Ruth's mother and younger sister were murdered in Auschwitz. I was instrumental in the setting of "Stolpersteine", small commemorative brass plaques in front of where they lived in Stuttgart.
Does anybody know anything about Ruth or Gillian?
I expect I would know some of the children in this film, if my memory of people from that time was not so poor. It won't be an age thing this loss of memory, as I seemed to have wiped most of my memories of being a patient at Queen Mary's not long after I left in 1962.