Excellent and moving

Rating: 9/10 (2 May 2011)

I have read and seen a lot about the Holocaust, and although I know that a story like that could not have happened in reality (the single line fence, where two kids could have met unobserved; the naivety and ignorance of an 8-year old boy), I was very moved and found the film extremely well done. In the end I could not hold back tears.
As a German for once I thought, wow, here is a German family in the Nazi period in a British film that does not look and sound like a caricature of Germans. The fact that all actors talked in accent-free English made it sound the way Germans sound to Germans: normal and without accent! The characters are even likable, in the beginning even the father.
And that is what makes the Holocaust all the more horrific. That there were so many "normal" people involved who, under different circumstances, would have led an unremarkable life, and would have been (more or less) nice and good colleagues, neighbours, family people. Only that, when their moral conscience was demanded, they were not able to see, to feel, to say 'no', out of a fear to stand up to 'authority', out of a misguided sense of 'duty', out of career ambitions, out of a lack of self-confidence that seduces one to follow the crowd, to use those that are singled out as 'enemies' and scapegoats to look down upon, to mistreat them, and in the end even to kill them. (The fact that it were your own people, sometimes your own grandfather or other family members who were involved in these crimes--and who you have known as friendly, lovable people in your family--is not easy to come to terms with for Germans who were born after the war.)
Hats off to all the actors, but in particular to the two boys who played Bruno and Shmuel.