She follows their stories through the difficult postwar years into the present, filming the survivors with their families in the countries in which they settled – the United States, Austria and the Czech Republic.
In June 1944, after a frenzied period of superficial improvements, they turned parts of the camp into a fake town and agreed to let the International Red Cross inspect it.
The inmates lived with the constant threat of deportation; thousands were regularly selected for transports to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland.
Their theatrical productions were often freer of censorship than those in the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe, as the Nazis did not generally bother to censor the inmates, whom they considered doomed.
Pepíček and Aninka try to earn money by singing for the town’s people, but the greedy organ grinder, Brundibár ("bumblebee" in Czech), drowns out their song.
– Variety [5] " 'Voices of the Children' achieves its powerful emotional force" – Tulsa World [6] "Intimate without being intrusive, sensitive without a jot of sentimentality."