Director Crafts New Take on Holocaust Story

Director Stefan Ruzowitzky said he would never make a movie about everyday life in a concentration camp. But his new film, "The Counterfeiters," is set almost entirely within the walls of the Sachsenhausen camp. Ruzowitzky sat down with the Daily Californian to discuss the film, an Austrian-German co-production which garnered a nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film.

"The Counterfeiters" is about Operation Bernhard, a secret-and failed-Nazi plot to destabilize the Allied economies by flooding England with falsified money.

Ruzowitzky explained his refusal to make a movie about the situation of a person he calls a normal concentration camp inmate. "I always felt it's impossible because you can't identify with the protagonists in terms of 'What would I do?'" he said. "This is what movies are about, and the situation of a normal inmate is so extreme."

The Jewish prisoners involved in the counterfeiting were torn between their ability to sabotage Nazi war efforts and their desperation to stay alive. This contrast intrigued Ruzowitzky.

"In the case of the counterfeiters, this is rather a morality play, set in a concentration camp," he said. "And these people, among other privileges, had the privilege of making moral choices."

Although the screenplay is based on the memoirs of Adolf Burger, a freedom fighter who survived Auschwitz, Ruzowitzky focused on the story of Sally Sorowitsch, an expert counterfeiter.

"From the very beginning I was intrigued by the idea to have a counterfeiter in a concentration camp," he said, "To have this gangster, crook, little criminal jailbird's perspective was something new, something we hadn't heard about."

The other counterfeiters were professionals and academics; Sorowitsch's criminal background makes his experience in the camp unique. Ruzowitzky pointed out that he had entered the camp directly from prison, which gave him tools to survive in the surreal Sachsenhausen environment.

"Not saying a concentration camp is just another prison," Ruzowitzky explained. "But still he knew how to deal with wardens, how to find a place within the inmates' hierarchy, that mix of violence, smartness, egotism to survive in a place like that."

So far, "The Counterfeiters" has been received well throughout Europe-with the exception of Germany. But Ruzowitzky cautioned against blaming the numbers on German attitudes toward the Holocaust.

"I think my generation is very well aware of the dimension of the crimes, and they are aware of a certain responsibility," he said. "It's not the guilt of my audience; it's the guilt of the grandparents of my audience."

In fact, Ruzowitzky explained that his own grandparents were Nazi sympathizers-one of the reasons he was drawn to this film. "I always felt sooner or later my career should make a statement about this part of our history, which is part of our family's history and part of our country's history," he said.

In the end, Ruzowitzky hoped to bring light to the overarching criminal nature of the fascist Nazi regime even beyond the mass murders.

"Many people will say (the Holocaust) is sort of collateral damage; actually fascism is about beautiful highways, trains being on time, law and order," he said. "They wouldn't see the Holocaust is actually the very essence of this ideology."

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