Secret Lives | AccessAtlanta

Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During World War II

Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During World War II

Shlomo Breznitz was hidden from Nazis in a Christian orphanage.

FILM FACTS

Director: Aviva Slesin
Rating: Not rated, but there is extremely disturbing footage of Nazis
Genre: Documentary

Discuss this film | Official movie site

See showtimes (Not rated) 72 minutes

Grade: B-

Verdict: Remarkable portraits of courage during the Nazi regime.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Aviva Slesin, who won the 1987 best-feature-documentary Oscar for "The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table," tackles very different and far more personal material in "Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During World War II."

This affecting documentary focuses on the people all over Europe who risked their lives to shelter Jewish children from the Nazis. Some of these kids, now in their 50s and 60s, have not seen their benefactors since the end of the war. Others have managed to keep in touch. Slesin herself spent the war as a hidden child, smuggled out of a Lithuanian ghetto in a suitcase.

Her documentary shows that her strength and empathy survived, but its shortcomings also suggest she may be too close to her subject.

"Secret Lives" offers remarkable newsreel footage -- Hitler's goons are so stereotypically Evil Nazis, you have to remind yourself this is real, not a Hollywood embellishment. Just as engrossing are the memories that pour out in interviews with the rescuers and rescued. One survivor spent the war in a wardrobe. Another recalls feeling abandoned and punished by his parents, who'd been shipped to the death camps. A third sheepishly admits, "I had a very nice time during the war. It's shameful to say, but the family was so extraordinarily kind and the mother thought of everything she could to make my life pleasurable."

However, pleasure was not the general rule -- for the rescuers as much as for the rescued. The Nazi policy was, anyone who helped a Jew would be treated like a Jew. One surprise confession among the chorus of gratitude and talk of "what any decent human would do" comes from a woman whose parents took in a Jewish child. Looking into the camera, she freely admits, "The thing I was so angry about was they [her parents] risked our lives."

But unlike 1987's "Weapons of the Spirit," which documented the courage of a French village that saved almost as many Jews as it had citizens, "Secret Lives" rarely manages a greater resonance beyond its parade of talking heads, family albums and old newsreels. In the earlier film, there was more of an effort to probe the mystery of goodness -- why people just do the just thing, even when threatened with their own suffering and death. By contrast, Slesin's film can feel claustrophobic and somewhat repetitive, no matter how powerful the material.

Still, this is still a unique testament to the brave men and women who chose to extend a helping hand instead of turning a blind eye. As one woman who gave up her 3-year-old daughter to a farm family rather than see her exterminated at Auschwitz recounts, "I said to the lady who took her in, 'You can punish her, you can christen her, you can do whatever you want. Only keep her alive.' "