Holocaust Horror in Hungary
By Skip Sheffield
April 28 is Yom Ashoah on the Jewish calendar. What better
time to view “Walking With The Enemy?”
Yom Asoah commemorates the dead of the Holocaust. It also
means “never again.”
Hungary
in World War II was aligned with Germany through its fascist Arrow
Cross Party, but it remained an independent country until the Nazis invaded
near the end of the war.
The story is inspired by a true Jewish-Hungarian hero,
Pinchas Rosenbaum. In the film, directed, co-written (with Kenny Golde) and
produced by Mark Schmidt, the Rosenbaum character is called Elek Cohen, and he
is played by handsome rising British-Irish star Jonas Armstrong.
The story begins in Budapest
in the spring of 1944. Elek is a university student enjoying a flirtation with
pretty Hannah (Hannah Schoen). Their carefree evening in a nightclub is marred
by anti-Semitic slurs, and Elek and his friends are ordered out. Nazi swastikas
are going up around town and Jews are being ordered to wear yellow stars.
We see the leader of the Jewish community meeting with the
head of the Arrow Cross Party, who assures him if Jews follow certain
restrictions, no harm will befall them.
Elek, the son of a rabbi, does not believe this, and
actively rebels against the growing anti-Jewish threat. For this he is arrested
and sent off to a prison labor camp. Elek escapes from the horrendous camp, but
when he returns home he find a non-Jewish family living in his old house. Jews
are being rounded up and shipped off. German pressure is being elevated by the
sadistic Col. Skorzeny (Burn Gorman).
Elek hatches a desperate plot: when an SS officer is killed,
he steals his uniform and impersonates a Nazi officer so he may learn more
about the enemy. Elek enlists the help of Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz (William Hope) to obtain
Swiss passports to save at least some of Hungary’s Jews.
There is a lot more going on in this film; plenty of
cruelty, violence, rape, intrigue and heartbreak, but at the least it made me proud of my
Swiss ancestry. I did not know its role in this horrific chapter of human
history. I did not know of Pinchas Rosenbaum either, but now I do, and I salute
his memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment