IN THE SACHSENHAUSEN PRINT SHOP—From left, August Diehl as Adolf Burger, Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch, Veit Stübner as Atze and August Zirner as Dr. Klinger.
Austrian Holocaust drama wins Oscar
‘Counterfeiters’ probes dilemma of Jews forced into Nazi plot
By Tom Tugend
article created on:
Much of the Jewish Oscar buzz this year focused on director Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” and the chances of an Israeli film picking up an Academy Award for the first time.
But it was another Jewish-themed film, “The Counterfeiters,” that ended up taking home foreign-language honors on Feb. 24.
Set in 1943, the Austrian film probes the moral dilemmas facing a special group of Jewish concentration camp inmates in a little-known and remarkable episode of World War II.
“There have been some great Austrian filmmakers working here,” director-writer Stefan Ruzowitzky said during his victory speech. “Most of them had to leave my country because of the Nazis, so it sort of makes sense that the first Austrian film to win the Oscar was about the Nazis’ crimes.”
In an interview with JTA, Ruzowitzky went further.
“My grandparents on both sides were Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, so I felt a special responsibility to deal with the Holocaust era,” he said. “I felt an equal responsibility not to exercise moral judgment on the Jews who collaborated in Operation Bernard.”
In the film, as the Nazis realize that the war is going against them, they try one more ploy—to wreck the economies of Britain and the United States with massive amounts of perfectly counterfeited pounds, sterling and dollars.
Under the code name Operation Bernard, the Germans combed concentration camps and assembled a team of more than 100 skilled Jewish printers, photographers and engravers.
In Sachsenhausen, the prisoners are placed in two isolated barracks dubbed “The Golden Cage.” They are given soft beds, good food, civilian clothes, first-class equipment and piped-in music.
Heading the team is Salomon Sorowitch, a character based on a Russian-born Jew named Salomon Smolianoff. Nicknamed “Sally,” he lived high in the Berlin of the 1920s and early 1930s as “The King of the Counterfeiters.”
Faced with the choice of instant death or producing pound notes so perfect that even the Bank of England would accept them, Sorowitch does the Nazis’ bidding.
By the end of the war, the Sachsenhausen team had turned out 134 million pounds, three times the amount of British currency reserves, and was close to producing equally perfect dollar bills.
Ruzowitzky does not draw Sorowitch, portrayed by Karl Markovics, as merely a craven collaborator. Sorowitch protects a fellow prisoner who is trying to sabotage the operation and uses his skills to acquire medicine for an ill inmate.
“The Counterfeiters” retains the tension of a top thriller, but it goes deeper. It probes a haunting moral question—given a chance at life, even temporary life, at the price of aiding the enemy, what path will a man choose?
The actual Smolianoff survived the war and soon resumed his old occupation, adding the “rediscovery” of old-master paintings to his repertoire. He died in Argentina in the 1960s.
The film’s ending, building on hearsay evidence, has Sorowitch after liberation toting a suitcase full of fake currency and heading for Monte Carlo, where he purposely loses the entire fortune at the gaming tables.
Ruzowitzky’s background and motivation is as interesting as the movie itself.
As noted, the filmmaker’s grandparents on both sides were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. Like most Austrians of the war and postwar generation, they saw themselves more as victims than perpetrators of the German atrocities.
“My grandparents would acknowledge to me the facts of the Holocaust but considered it a collateral damage to the war,” Ruzowitzky said during a phone interview.
Given his background and nationality, the director felt he had a responsibility to deal with the Holocaust era, but an equal duty not to exercise moral judgment on the Jews who collaborated in Operation Bernard.
One reason he closed the film with the scene at a Monte Carlo casino “was to give Sally some redemption, or atonement, at the end,” Ruzowitzky said.
From his considerable research on concentration camps, he concluded that “the system was designed so that the inmates would harm each other.”
Ruzowitzky cited one survivor, a doctor, as saying, “If you tried to do anything good, it would lead to catastrophe.”