Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

A Disappointing Continuation

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Maybe I was reading history wrong, but Buchenwald filled with well fed, clean shaved prisoners who can go wherever and whenever they like is a bit of suspicious to me... all became very clear when I actually realized what the plot is: brave Germans in concentration camp are bravely saving Polish Jewish boy, of course there is also a German SS officer who helps them with this brave deed. Should I mention that most of "dialogues" is pure exposition? There is something really perverse happening here: Germans making money out of whitewashing holocaust, I mean c'c'c'come on! Watch this movie only if you like to see old people naked.

I first heard about Buchenwald before I started kindergarten. My parents were talking in the living room late at night and they didn't realize I was in the hallway listening. My uncle was the Army photographer (in the Signal Corps) who accompanied the troops as they liberated Buchenwald. This film, for all of it's merits, seems like a whitewash. It didn't even scratch the surface of the horrors of Buchenwald. When the troops arrived there were human beings, still alive though just skin and bones, stacked like cordwood (i.e. layer upon layer of human beings, stacked in alternating directions). Not just one stack, there were many, many stacks lined up and prepared to be moved into the ovens. When he visited the home of the camp commander he photographed lamps with shades made from human skin, skin with tattoos. My father spoke of drums using human skin. There were other things. These images have polluted my mind from my youngest years. I barely knew what tattoos were...only because of Popeye the Sailor man, and when the drums were mentioned, I had the image of bongo drums because I heard these things in '61 or'62 and bongo drums were all the rage. I remember these things though I just heard them once. My uncle's photographs are in the Library of Congress. He never took another photograph in his life, never smiled, never visited the mountains, never visited the snow, and never spoke of what he had witnessed except once in 1961 or '62 in a special meeting with his father, his brothers, and his brother in law. The film is a good story, but the scenes of the camp and the prisoners seem like a Sunday picnic versus the reality. It felt more like history was being covered up than illuminated by this film.

The film is based on a novelization of the true story of a boy who was brought to Buchenwald with his father (not a stranger as depicted in the film) near the end of the war, while the mother and sister were killed in Auschwitz. The novel was written by a man who himself was a prisoner at Buchenwald for eight years, which lends credibility to the scene he paints. Nevertheless, some aspects of the situation in the camp and some dramatic events in the story were implausible. For me this undercut the grim realism and emotional impact of the film. It turns out that the actual story is both more tragic and morally ambiguous (search "buchenwald boy guardian" to learn more), whereas the film rather simplistically aims to depict "the best and worst of humanity."

This is a superbly done film but don't watch it if you're already in a downer. Or you don't have access to a stiff drink. It is grim and graphic. The violence and horror are simply stated but not exploited. It also gets beyond the Holocaust, portraying the seldom documented horrors the Nazis inflicted on non Jewish political prisoners. Nobody knows what life in the camps was like unless they had lived through it. But this may come closer than most such pictures. Dark and unrelentingly morbid, it is still a worthwhile watch but not an easy one. You will finish watching by pondering how an educated, civilized nation like Germany let this happen and by asking yourself how you might have reacted to the many moral dilemmas posed in the story. Not a film to enjoy but certainly one to watch!