Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Writers: Stefan Ruzowitzky, Adolf Burger
Cast: Karl Markovics, August Diehl, DevidStriesow

On the evidence of Downfall, Black Book, and The Pianist, it seems that after seeing a half-century of American chest beating, Europeans are themselves ready to honestly assess and pick through the bones of their dark past. With his Academy Award win for best foreign film, director Stefan Ruzowitzky has proven with The Counterfeiters, that the best people to make films about the Holocaust and the war in Europe, are Europeans.

In barracks 18 and 19 of the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen, there was a table-tennis table, music, and well-fed Jews wearing civilian clothes. But the clothes were those of gassed Jews, and the table tennis and music couldn’t cover the sounds of torture and suffering just out of sight. The small crew of men inhabiting these barracks worked, under threat of death, to counterfeit, first the British pound, and then the American dollar in order to prop-up the failing Nazi regime.

Front and centre of this amazing true story is Salomon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics – Inspector Rex), a Russian Jew and master forger. Imprisoned before the war began, then transferred to a concentration camp, Sally began sketching pictures of the prison guards in return for favourable treatment (like being allowed to live).  He’s eventually transferred to Sachsenhausen to oversee ‘Operation Bernhard’, or the ‘Golden Cage’, as the inmates called it.

The Counterfeiters is a gripping and tense drama of humanity and inhumanity, where success equals both survival and defeat. The team of forgers work diligently; trying on the surface to perfect the two currencies, while sabotaging the project so the Nazis can’t flood the market with their fakes. The ethical and moral dilemmas of these ‘lucky’ Jews are played out wretchedly within the confines of the two barracks, resulting in a wonderfully claustrophobic exploration of the Holocaust.

The Counterfeiters rates 4 stars.