Holocaust films are, for the most part, difficult. By the nature of celluloid, they’re rendered on the same stuff as Hollywood glory, where every tear shed for Schindler is undone by a sneaky one for Braveheart.
It’s simply hard to enlicit raw emotions from an audience when we’re so far removed from the agony; kicking back at the local multiplex, chugging popcorn while demanding the next new sensation. So when The Counterfeiter elicits a merciless emotional response, it’s as surprising as it is disturbing.
Salomon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch is a Jew and highly successful counterfeiter who is taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he’s to lead a hand picked group of prisoners enlisted to forge the British and American currency on behalf of the Nazis. The prisoners are rewarded for their efforts by residing in the Golden Cage, a ‘luxury’ area with beds, food, sanitation and the clothes of murdered Auschwitz inmates.
It’s as the men begin fighting over whether to comply and survive or sabotage the project for the greater good that The Counterfeiter creeps under your skin, forcing you to relate to Sally’s guilty survival instinct while others behind the wall suffer.
The result is a film that all but ignores the usual wartime moralising, dealing in issues that we can relate to rather than the unimaginable horror of the gas chambers. But don’t be fooled, the view from the coveted seat of historical hindsight is by no means a pretty one.
