(Contains Spoilers) Enjoyed it, but feel vaguely uneasy

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2000)

This comment contains spoilers. I have only just seen this film on video. I neither loved nor hated it, but didn't think it made a very strong point. I'm surprised people were so moved by it as they obviously were. However I can't help having an uneasy feeling that if you are going to use the Holocaust (or any similar scenario) to make what is a fairly simplistic point about the power of love (we all know that parents will give their lives for the sake of their children - it is part of folklore and in the holocaust real victims did it all the time) you must be accurate and detailed. To tell a story that simply couldn't have happened (for example the child would simply not have survived even one day at Auschwitz, the barracks bore no resemblance to any I have ever seen in photographs - and where was the kapo? nor was it at all easy to contact a woman if you were in the men's camp) it seems to me makes the whole thing meaningless. The railway journey struck me as weird. Having packed its characters into a realistic cattle truck, the film then sends them on a journey lasting about five minutes, from which they get down only slightly dishevelled. I doubted the camp was even supposed to represent Auschwitz, and assume it had to be in Italy from the shortness of the journey and the lack of hardship endured. Where are the dead bodies? Auschwitz was also not liberated by Americans. Okay, so it's a fairy tale. But are we entitled to tell fairy tales about the Holocaust? Even if we are, why tell this one, risking the wrath of the genuine Holocaust survivors for trivialising their experience, for what seems a very shallow message?