It was this kind of skill set that was required for survival.
Don’t try to turn off your emotions in “The Counterfeiters.” It’s easy to say
that this is the story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history; easy
too, to add that it was set up by the Nazis in 1936 to soak and destroy the
British economy with fake pounds while defraying the cost of the Nazi war
machine. Nearly easy still, to report that the whole thing unfolds in a Nazi
concentration camp where the counterfeiters are given the space and equipment to
do their job.
What isn’t
easy by any measure is watching the things that run along under the surface and
tear these men apart. These prisoners, with their music, food, clean beds, and
water, are within faint earshot of the regular prisoners who are being gassed,
shot, beaten, and starved. Because of their skills, they stay alive while the
others die; to make it worse, their daily work, exquisitely exacting,
contributes to the enemy effort.
The leader of
this team is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), formerly a carefree and
successful counterfeiter in pre-war Berlin. He is arrested by detective
Friedrich Herzog (David Striesow) – “It is an honor to arrest the world’s best
counterfeiter” – and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp where he survives
by painting monumental portrait images of Nazi officers. Detective Herzog, now
morphed into the SS officer in charge of the counterfeit project, Operation
Bernhard, plucks Sorowitsch from the doomed men and assembles his team.
Sally, as he
is called, turns a face of stone to both his captors and fellow prisoners as he
operates on an intuitive survival code: adapt, or die. Fueled by an expert’s
pride, Sally turns out perfect pound notes, but the team’s success becomes just
too much for some of the idealists to bear. Adolf Burger (August Diehl), begins
a subtle sabotage of the notes as Burger and Sally become the focus of the
conflict between idealism and reality.
When
humiliation and brutality and indignity are poured on Sally or his men, he
maintains his face of stone but goes off alone to let his fury out in physical
rage at anything inanimate that is close at hand. Both SS officer Herzog and
Sorowitsch are conniving survivors. Herzog is a man, empty and ordinary, who is
given sudden power in an atmosphere of grotesque abuse. With great respect for
Sorowitsch and disgust for Herzog, we watch the skills of adaptation save many
men at the hand of one and destroy many at the hand of the other. In Sally, Karl
Markovics creates a complex man who is a shrewd gambler, a risk taker rather
than of a hero. It was this kind of skill set that was required for survival –
of himself and of his peers. There was no room for conventional heroics in a
concentration camp. Perhaps the real question is how anyone who survived this
kind of cruelty and barbarity ever again experienced pleasure without pain.
Copyright (c) Illusion