I first saw this film at the Mile End Odeon in East London when I was a kid. I was with a couple of friends and we thought that this film would be just another British war film. However, Mile End in those days still had a reasonably large Jewish population and older people all around us kids were openly weeping throughout the showing of the film. Later, in the foyer a woman told us that her family had been killed during the Hollocaust. A saw this film again quite recently on television and it really is quite a remarkable film. The characters have real depth and the the story about nuns sheltering Jewish children from the Nazis in Italy during World War II is not sentimentalised. The sub-plot concerning an unrequited love story between an Italian officer and a novice nun is is really well presented and does not intrude on the main story concerning Nazi ruthlessness and brutality towards the Jewish children and the nuns.
