'STRANGERS' PUTS COMPELLING, HUMAN FACE ON HOLOCAUST.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Longtime documentarian Mark Jonathan Harris has an incredible gift for illuminating aspects of the Holocaust others tend to overlook. This was evident in his fascinating, Oscar-winning film ``The Long Way Home,'' which chronicled the post-liberation struggles of European Jews in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

And Harris' new film, ``Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport,'' is arguably even more remarkable, not least because it humanizes the subject as few documentaries have. Or could have, quite simply because it's about one of the few successful Holocaust rescue efforts, one that saved a good 10,000 lives to tell their tales.

And what tales they are. As rich with complexity and ambiguity as the human condition itself, these stories of the Kindertransport - the only government-sanctioned program to transfer Jews and other Nazi-targeted individuals from prewar Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to a safe haven - uplift, of course. But the fact that this great humanitarian gesture was so restrictive, isolated and in its own unique way soulfully punishing to the most vulnerable of victims is never far in the background.

It goes without saying that history made this personal is the greatest rebuttal to the lies that motivate genocide. ``Strangers'' rubs shoulders with the finest works of art about the Holocaust that have done that.

Actually, the film was the brainchild of Deborah Oppenheimer, a TV sitcom producer (``The Drew Carey Show'') whose mother was one of the 10,000 saved. Though the subject was too troubling for much family discussion, Oppenheimer was always curious and, upon her mother's death, recruited Harris on a journey of deep historical discovery.

They discovered the kinder, who had taken the most incredible of journeys themselves.

Following the Reich-wide Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, the civilized world collectively tsk-tsk'd and did nothing, with one exception. Outrage festered in Britain, and within a month the government agreed to take in a large number of refugees. But the condition for acceptance was heartbreaking: no one over the age of 17 would be admitted. Thus, parents throughout Central Europe were faced with the agonizing decision of whether to send their children away to strangers or keep the family together in the face of the Nazi monster. Some found the strength to do the right, tough thing.

Of course, the kids possessed widely varying degrees of knowledge as to why they were being transported. Some knew they were lucky, many felt abandoned, most found themselves slung between both emotions. In England, some were welcomed like true sons and daughters into families they'd never met before, others were clearly less liked by successions of foster parents, still others were billeted in hostels that, as events churned on the continent, mutated into orphanages.

A few of these displaced little children actually managed to get their relatives out of the Reich before the war commenced in September 1939 (the invasion of Poland also put an abrupt end to the Kindertransport). The vast majority, of course, lost all contact with home and learned the worst years later.

Harris has cannily chosen little-seen archival and home movie footage from the period and goes to great lengths to give us succinct and telling information about the overall political situation at the time (although most nations' excuse for not accepting Jewish refugees was some toxic mixture of endemic anti-Semitism and late-Depression concern about job protection, America's refusal to take in kinder was uniquely hypocritical: Congressional critics killed the bill by arguing that admitting children without parents was contrary to the laws of God). Judi Dench provides the tasteful, detail-rich narration.

But the movie's glorious masterstroke is the straight-to-camera, clear-eyed testimonies of the now elderly kinder and the even older generation who, however imperfectly, helped them.

The writer Lore Segal, who managed to save her mother (still alive and also interviewed in the film), notes how she now views her unhappy sojourns with families of different classes than the one she'd been born into as an author's precious gift. Lory Cahn recalls being pulled out of a Kindertransport train window by the father who just couldn't let her go - and the later cattle car ride to Auschwitz he had no power to prevent. Tough old dog Alexander Gordon describes his determination, as an especially star-crossed teen-age orphan, to kill his emotions in order to survive - and acknowledges in his twilight years that his capacity for love was the only reason fate let him live.

Dozens more stories - some subtler, some more dramatic, all shot through with bittersweet irony - makes ``Strangers'' a knockout. It's an honestly balanced mix of triumph and tragedy, as any true Holocaust survival story must be. But it transcends even that, rising to some height where we can see that goodness and difficulty and uncertainty and life are all pretty much the same thing.

``INTO THE ARMS OF STRANGERS: STORIES OF THE KINDERTRANSPORT''

(Rated PG; violence, children in jeopardy).

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris. Produced by Deborah Oppenheimer. Released by Warner Bros. Running time: One hour, 57 minutes. Playing: AMC Century 14, Century City. Our rating: Four stars.