Set in 1940s Holland during German occupation.

Rating: Null/10 (5 February 2008)

The movie actually begins in 1956 when a bus of tourists pull up to a community in Israel. One of the tourists, a lady, wanders over to the school and takes a flash photo. The teacher begins to admonish her for disturbing her lesson, then they recognize each other, having been in Holland together during the 1940s when Nazi Germany was carrying on operations to round up and dispose of Jews.
Carice van Houten is the lead character Rachel, who takes on the name of Ellis and lightens her hair to avoid being recognized as a Jew. She is the teacher in Israel in 1956. The movie is mostly her story and how she gets to that point in her life. There is a "black book" but in the movie we don't come across it until the very end.
This is a very well told story, hard to watch at points because of the depiction of the German mistreatment of the Jews. A key character is Sebastian Koch as German officer Ludwig Müntze who, through a relationship he develops with Ellis turns his focus towards sympathy towards the Jews.
We watched it with old friends who have a reputation for falling asleep during the second half of movies. neither of them even came close to falling asleep, and that is about the highest compliment I can give this movie. It holds your attention all the way.
SPOILERS: The targets were the wealthy Jews in Holland, a trusted lawyer would arrange for their passage to Belgium, but they really were being set up for a massacre, and after killing all of them, stole all their money, gold bars, and other valuables. Rachel/Ellis managed to escape by diving into the water and went undetected. At the end, after her lover Müntze was executed for being a sympathizer and traitor, she found the black book that the lawyer kept, revealing all the conspirators, and she took all the recovered loot to build the center in Israel where she is teaching in 1956.