Hanns Skoutajan  fled from the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia with his parents in 1938 - 39 .
A new documentary film based on his book,  Uprooted and Transplanted, revisits some of the milestones on that journey in search of a new home, first to Scotland then to western Canada.
          Sudeten German refugees from Hitler were settled on abandoned homesteads. Hanns’ parents were city people who had had no             experience with farming, let alone living far from the basic amenities to which they had been accustomed, e.g.. electricity, plumbing, water. Three years after the outbreak of war they left the farm and came east where his father was retrained and found work in a war plant in eastern Ontario established by Thomas Bata who had also fled from Czechoslovakia.
         Hanns’ choice of vocation, the ministry in the United Church of Canada, was strongly influenced by that odyssey from tragedy to freedom. He often likened it to the flight of the Israelites from Egypt, indeed, a segment of the film using animation retells that biblical story.
      The account also returns to Europe after the war and tells of the fate of the 3.5 million ethnic Germans who were “cleansed” from the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia.
       The 50 minute documentary  is called Hitler's German Foes, begins on Parliament Hill as Hanns in his clerical robes quotes the well known words of the German cleric Martin Niehmuller in which he condemns inaction against the abuse of human rights, “. ....finally they came after me and there was no one left to defend me.” Unfortunately the story told by Hanns continues to be timely many years after the events he describes.
      Hitler’s German Foes is a Norflicks Production, directed by Tom Gregor and filmed by Czech Television. It is available from Ashland Video Corporation : Stage 13 , 629 Eastern Ave., Toronto , M4M 1E4.  Both the DVD and Hanns' book are available from him via e-mail.

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