A scene from Lore.

From countless movies, books and television documentaries on the History Channel, we know about the Nazis who were rounded up and tried as war criminals after World War II, but what about the children of the Third Reich who survived? What happened to them in the eyes of the allies, the Germans and the world? This issue is illuminated in Lore, a brave, gripping, relentlessly absorbing film from Australia, shot in Germany and played entirely in German with English subtitles. It’s Australia’s deserving contender for this year’s Academy Award, for a very good reason. As a chilling footnote to the most brutal chapter in human history, and a Holocaust film unlike any other, it shows the legacy of Nazism through the eyes of innocent children in the aftermath of horror. Without the usual scenes of torture and carnage, it examines the postwar landscape of a defeated ideology with wrenching force. In Lore, the battles are fought in the hearts and minds of children so young that their only crime was to believe the lies their parents told them. Prepare to be moved to tears. 

In the spring of 1945, when the Allied forces conquer Germany, the last traces of resistance fade and Hitler and his closest advisers lock themselves in an underground bunker to commit suicide, a 14-year-old girl named Lore (hauntingly played by newcomer Saskia Rosendahl) is almost relieved. It means that her father, a high-ranking S.S. officer, is coming home to Bavaria for good. But the celebration is short-lived, as her parents hastily dress their five children and prepare to flee—packing up the silver, killing the family dog and erasing any evidence of their involvement with the Nazi regime by burning photographs, documents, medical records and official books like “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.” For a while, they hide out on an isolated farm, but the father is sent to a prison camp and the traumatized mother, raped and half-mad with despair, surrenders, leaving Lore in charge of her four younger siblings, including an infant still in diapers. The tables have turned, and loyal followers of Hitler now find themselves victims of their own toxic arrogance. With some of her mother’s jewelry and enough money to purchase train tickets to their grandmother’s house, 560 miles north of Hamburg, Lore is left to fend for herself and save the children from the advancing Allied armies.

Lore.

Most of the film is a grueling road trip that doesn’t spare the wrenching details. Hiking across a war-ravaged country, the children encounter dead bodies, live on raw eggs and beg for bread. On the walls in town squares, Lore sees her first photos of concentration camp atrocities, and is informed by locals that the pictures are pure American propaganda and the emaciated people in striped camp uniforms are really paid actors. In a deserted farmhouse, she meets an old woman who is willing to trade drinking water for her mother’s wedding ring, and in a barn, she steals a wristwatch from a suicide victim. They are stopped on the road by hostile American soldiers and saved from arrest by a Jewish boy from Buchenwald, who protects them by pretending he’s their older brother, because “Americans love Jews.” Still brainwashed by the Führer-worshiping, anti-Semitic hatred of her falsely superior upbringing, Lore is shocked by the younger children’s acceptance of his kindness and confused by her own growing sexual tension in his presence. To survive, she is forced to trust the kind of person she was taught to fear and despise. But even though her view is maturing, she cannot avoid the suspicious fellow Germans she encounters, like the woman reduced to poverty and starvation who still keeps a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler on the wall, fighting back tears: “We broke his heart, he loved us so much.” The way in which Lore reaches her epiphany, accepts the truth she was sheltered from for so many years and denounces her misplaced patriotism is emotionally overwhelming.

Beautifully photographed and acted by an exquisite cast of children who never make a single move that is calculated or less than believable, Lore is the second film by the gifted director and co-writer Cate Shortland, after her acclaimed 2004 debut feature Somersault, which also dealt with a teenager’s sexual awakening in the face of adversity and challenge. But Lore delves even deeper, not only into the forced sacrifice of one girl’s childhood, but into the complicity with which so many Germans of all ages drank the Kool-Aid of organized insanity that led to criminal domination and international ruin. It’s a remarkable accomplishment.

rreed@observer.com

LORE

Running Time 109 minutes

Written by Cate Shortland, Robin Mukherjee and Rachel Seiffert (novel)

Directed by Cate Shortland

Starring Saskia Rosendahl, Kai-Peter Malina and Nele Trebs

4/4

The Nazis have begun their liquidation of Lvov, randomly murdering Jews for the sport of it and trucking away thousands to concentration camps. Here is a time and place of torture and death where everyone steals from everyone else to stay alive and nobody can be trusted—especially a sour and burly hamhock of a sewer worker and petty thief named Leopold Socha. Between robberies, he one day encountered some Polish Jews trying to escape from the ghetto before the Gestapo found them. For a price, he showed them how to climb down from a hole in the street into the murk and foul-smelling slime of the underground tunnels. Living with rats, eating a raw onion if they were lucky, separating from their families, giving birth to children surrounded by excrement, they miraculously survived for 14 months. When their money ran out, this accidental hero and his hardened, calloused wife above ground somehow discovered a conscience they didn’t know they had and protected their “children of war” from one near-fatal mishap after the next. In time, the lives of dependants and reluctant saviors alike intertwine with such inspired candor and force that the ensemble cast literally takes on the souls of the characters. They are so real that after a while you forget you are watching actors at all. This is especially true of Robert Wieckiewicz, an expressive and celebrated stage star in Poland who does wonders depicting the conflicting moral and religious instincts of Socha, a tough, emotionally detached sewer inspector and predatory crook whose criminal instinct for self-protection was betrayed by his new-found empathy for the disenfranchised. Only a handful of his Jews came through the ordeal alive, but the real Socha has since been honored for his humanitarian efforts, along with other brave Poles who altered human destiny by saving persecuted Jews from the gas chambers—specifically Oskar Schindler.

Warsaw-born director Holland, whose native epics about World War II, such as Europa, Europa, have always surpassed her more commercial English-speaking work (The Secret Garden, Washington Square), does such a thorough job depicting authenticity that the filth and degradation of the claustrophobic sewer eventually get to you. There’s an actual childbirth and the smothering of a baby I could not watch, as well as a deathly flood that proves to be an act of betrayal. It is to the credit of a sound screenplay by David Shamoon that the film carefully balances the fear and selfishness of the victims without sentimentality. Neither Socha nor the Jews are angels. Some of them are despicable on both sides of the equation. Without overdoing the atrocities, Ms. Holland attempts to illustrate the many cruel aspects of war’s effects on its victims as well as its perpetrators. The title is apropos, because most of the film submerges the viewer into a labyrinthine subterranean blackness that makes it difficult to share the experiences. We squint to watch them, and struggle to feel the sexual and emotional attractions that keep their minds from closing the bridge to insanity.

In Darkness is gloomy and hard to take for a running time of 145 minutes, but it’s an important film, related with deep conviction, and uncompromising in its understanding of the remarkable things members of the human race have done—to, for, and against each other—in the wilderness of war.

rreed@observer.com

IN DARKNESS

Running Time 145 minutes

Written by David F. Shamoon

Directed by Agnieszka Holland

Starring Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann and Agnieszka Grochowska

3.5/4

Scott Thomas.

The versatile and accomplished Kristin Scott Thomas works skillfully in both English and French. In Sarah’s Key she is never less than perfect doing both. It’s another in a long line of harrowing stories about the horrors of the Holocaust, but don’t let that deter you. It’s more a detective story than a depressing diary of atrocity, as it tells dual narratives set in 1942 and the present. Based on the popular novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, director Gilles Paquet-Brenner has done an elegant job of reducing a complex piece with many components into a riveting narrative that grabs you by the lapels and refuses to loosen its grip.

Paris. July 1942. A 10-year-old Jewish girl named Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance) hears disturbing noises in the street outside her family’s apartment in the Marais district. Panic spreads through the neighborhood with the inevitable sound of fists banging on doors. It’s not the dreaded Nazis who drag the Jews away and imprison them in the stadium called the Vélodrome d’Hiver, but the French police, under orders from the Vichy government, who round up their own people. Little Sarah makes a valiant attempt to save at least one member of her family by hiding her baby brother in a locked bedroom closet and taking the key, promising she’ll be back to rescue him. How could she know her family would never return? In one of the most scandalous chapters of cowardice, fear and treachery in the history of France, 13,000 Jews were herded into trucks and shipped to concentration camps. It’s the same political theme and historical setting of Joseph Losey’s great 1976 film, Mr. Klein, with Alain Delon.

Cut to 2009. Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist who has lived in Paris for 20 years, is assigned to write an article about the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium and the part it played in this shameful footnote to World War II history. Moving with her French husband into a new home that has been in his family for 60 years, her sleuthing reveals it’s the same apartment that was occupied by Sarah when her family was dispossessed and deported, and she becomes obsessed with telling the story of the family that used to live there. Both stories, half a century apart, cut back and forth, and the 1942 events are not for the faint of heart. The conditions inside the stadium, with no air, water or toilets, are somber to the point of repugnance as Mr. Paquet-Brenner spares no detail: the sewage, the bodies hurled from the roof, the bodies packed like rotting sardines into trucks to the transit camps where men and women were forcibly separated and their screaming children abandoned in confusion and terror. The chapters unfold like the pages of a book you can’t put down: as Sarah risks her life to hold onto the key to the door where she hid her 4-year-old brother, a family of farmers hides her from the Germans, and she eventually works her way to Paris to find what’s inside the secret cupboard.

In the contemporary story, Julia uncovers the guilt her in-laws feel, jeopardizing her marriage in her tireless efforts to find out what happened to Sarah. The story filters through generations of people with different family names and identities as it traces a labyrinthine story from Paris to Florence to New York, where the story ends with an American (sensitively played by Aidan Quinn) who ties up the loose threads in ways that are a shock to everyone, including himself. Painful, blood-curdling and ultimately heartbreaking, Sarah’s Key occasionally moves too ponderously for its own good, but its myriad elements are coherent and easy to follow. The results will keep you on the edge of your seat. As a mystery about the consequences of a deplorable period of political crime in occupied France, and as a tale about how dredging up the past has a ripple effect on the present, Sarah’s Key is full of engaging surprise elements. From start to finish, the opaque performance by Ms. Thomas is emotionally moving as she comes to terms with the secrets of the past as they relate to her own life, proving the theory that truth often has a very high price indeed.

rreed@observer.com

SARAH’S KEY

Running time 111 minutes

Written by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and Serge Joncour

Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Mélusine Mayance, Aidan Quinn

3/4