The Baby Trailer (2012)

Trailer for the documentary The Baby.

To hear Anneke Thompson-Kohnke tell it, she has led a fairly ordinary life. Perhaps now, but in the beginning it was quite the contrary. Anneke’s earliest memories do not really exist prior to a boat ride from the Netherlands to the United States in 1946 when she was almost six years old. Now sixty-five years later, this mystery begins to unravel. Through a series of interviews, childhood photos, and archival materials, we learn about Anneke’s early life: She was born in Hilversum on Christmas day 1940 to a young Jewish musician and his wife; Anne Frank babysat her in Amsterdam (their mothers were friends back in Germany); and her parents hired a courier to secret her away to safety with a Christian family in Voorburg when she was less than two years old. But how did she come to live in New York three years later? Revelatory and heartbreaking, we watch as all of Anneke’s past unfolds before her.