Oscar-winning film The Counterfeiters is a Holocaust movie with a moral conundrum - should skilled death camp inmates have helped the Nazi war effort? Helen Barlow reports
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When he accepted his Oscar Academy Award for best foreign film for The Counterfeiters at this year's ceremony, Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky paid tribute to his countrymen and cinematic forbears in Hollywood.
"Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger ... most of them had to leave my country
because of the Nazis. So it sort of makes sense that the first Austrian movie to win an Oscar is about the Nazis' crimes."
A real-life story of Jewish survival, The Counterfeiters came about via unusual means.
It tells of the Jewish concentration camp inmates who counterfeited British and American currency for the Nazis, who were desperate to bankrupt their enemies' economies.
But was it right for the prisoners to accept the privileges afforded them for their efforts or should they have resisted and surely faced death?
The character of master counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch is based on Salomon Smolianoff, a notorious forger of art and money.
"Little is known about him", says Karl Markovics, the Austrian stage and television actor who plays Sorowitsch in the film.
"All we knew about him is that he wanted to become a painter. He studied painting in Russia where he was born and had to leave because his parents were on the other side of the Revolution. When he started a new life in Germany he met a counterfeiter and decided it was better to become counterfeiter and have a good life instead of starving and being a great artist. He found a direct way to make money by making money."
The film begins in wonderfully seedy pre-war Berlin, where just before fleeing, Sorowitsch is nabbed by the Nazis. For the first four years of his incarceration he wins privileges from SS guards by creating their portraits, and ultimately moves to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to set up the counterfeiting unit.
"The story is mostly based on fact," explains Markovics.
"The movie has to strengthen the chain of events of course, but the main characters, the operetta music to motivate the workers, the ping pong table, the clean beds with sheets, are all for real.
"This came from Adolf Burger's autobiography. He's one of the last survivors of this counterfeiting unit and Stefan didn't write a line without him agreeing."
Printer and communist Adolf Burger had already lost his wife in Auschwitz and was determined to resist. Now in his 90s, Burger has made the telling of his story his life's work. He lectured extensively in schools and distilled the facts into a kind of espionage form to hold teenagers' interest. This greatly helped Ruzowitzky in writing the screenplay, so that the film became a gripping thriller as well. The crux of the story, though, is the moral dilemma.
"The way the audience has to see the story through the eyes of the main characters forces us to ask ourselves what we would do," Markovics notes. "How would I react? Which side would I be on? There's no answer, no solution. In the end the Nazi regime broke down and the camps were liberated before the money got out, but if the war hadn't ended the prisoners may all have been killed."
While the Sachsenhausen counterfeiting enclosure was reconstructed at Berlin's Babelsberg studios, Markovics, who like Ruzowitzky is not Jewish, recalls his visit to the camp, which is now a kind of museum.
"The atmosphere there grabbed me and took hold of me. Scenes of the treatment of Jews in Vienna 70 years ago flashed through my mind. We had to be careful to get rid of our own emotions while making the film, even if we all personally felt that now this period is over, this must never happen again."
Although such a statement may seem obvious to us, in Austria the right wing remains strong.
"As an Austrian filmmaker I feel I have to take a stand on this issue," Ruzowitzky admits.
"I'm not saying it's the most important issue of my life, but it's important, especially in Austria, where confronting and dealing with that past is still much more problematic than is the case in Germany."
LOWDOWN
What: The Counterfeiters, Oscar-winning Holocaust thriller about a team of Jewish forgers helped the Nazis print fake allied cash
When: Opens at cinemas on September 11.
