Maybe the most powerful indictment of Nazism ever made by Hollywood.

Rating: 10/10 (6 May 2011)

Not only is this movie not revisionist history or a whitewashing of the Holocaust, this movie may be the most powerful and compelling indictment of Nazism ever made by Hollywood. The question is: Is the story plausible? The answer to that question is yes. Children did live in these concentration camps. Not many, but some, and inmates did interact with people outside. There were literally hundreds of concentration camps located throughout Nazi occupied Europe and given the number of camps and the huge number of people detained, interacting was not only possible, it was inevitable. Maybe the movie stretches matters a bit regarding how the two boys meet, but the idea on which it is based is valid. Should the audience feel any sympathy for the Nazi family? Why not? Maybe not for the husband, the commandant of the camp, who is hardcore Nazi, but certainly for the wife and daughter who clearly are victims too. This movie should be treated for what it is: a work of fiction that deals with certain themes that are universally applicable. These themes include friendship, culpability, loyalty, indeed the whole question of consciousness and morality. The wife's outrage is enough to show that she for one did not accept what was happening in the camps and did what she could to make her feelings known. Yet the most pathetic character is the commandant himself whose destructiveness and brutality is matched only by his stupidity which has tragic consequences and which he realizes to be the case after it's too late.