This movie is an insult to anyone who has experienced the real holocaust, not this contrived, farcical version.

Rating: 1/10 (1 August 2002)

Words escape me! Perhaps ludicrous, contrived, insulting come close. There is nothing factual about the depiction of the holocaust in this ridiculous, totally unbelievable mess. Death camps were not nasty places where people toted weights around, got a little dirty but remained shaven, were able to keep their sons not only hidden but alive and well despite a starvation diet, had access to records, phonographs and loud speakers, could basically move about at will and suffer little more than the inconveniences of a run down boarding house. This movie claims the camp where our heroes sojourn is a death camp, (not one of the thousands of concentration camps that were located throughout Nazi occupied territories) complete with gas chambers and ovens. There were only six death camps, all in Poland, and all were dedicated, absolutely dedicated, to the dehumanization unto hideous death of their inmates. Slow agonizing demise from Zyklon B was the easy part; twenty minutes of choking, while clawing at your throat and eyes and it was over. The devastating removal of every vestige of humanity through constant beatings, lack of sleep, lack of food and water, lack of any semblance of medical care, torments that ate away at body and spirit over endless days, was the intolerable part. No one ever spoke to a guard without being shot on the spot. Guido would not have been taken around a bend to be killed, he would have been shot, or beaten to death, or hanged, publically to display for the other prisoners both his impotence and the Nazi's total control over life itself. It is absolutely impossible for a boy to have been hidden for a day much less weeks in a death camp. To depict this living hell as a Stalag full of Schultz's, largely ignoring at least one of the inmates, who gets to clean up and wait tables, with his son, no less, is an insult to every person who has been touched by the real horror of the holocaust. This would have been a great propaganda film for Goebbels to have shown to the Red Cross to show how humane the Nazis really were. If this was meant to work as some laugh-your-way-through-life's-troubles allegory, then a vehicle more appropriate than the greatest genocide ever perpetrated by man against man should have been chosen as the vehicle. As it stands this movie is a travesty.