Entertaining Nazi-era ‘Counterfeiters’ is real deal

By Roger Moore

- The Orlando Sentinel

It takes a special brand of movie-making courage to make a Holocaust drama that’s more entertaining than moving. Ask Roberto Benigni if the world ever forgave him for “Life is Beautiful.”

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Karl Markovics is Salomon Sorowitsch in the Oscar-winning foreign film “The Counterfeiters.”

But “The Counterfeiters,” 2008’s Oscar-winning best foreign film (from Austria), is just such a movie. This dark, absorbing thriller is not just a moral exercise in the awful choices faced by those determined to survive history’s worst genocide. It invites us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of a not-quite-lovable rogue who is determined, by hook or by crook, to survive.

Karl Markovics stars as Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch, a poker-faced forger who, when we meet him, has just arrived in Monte Carlo. It’s 1945 and he’s shown up, fresh from World War II, in a worn suit toting a briefcase full of Yankee dollars. He gambles, he meets a woman, but never a hint of pleasure crosses his face. He remembers how he came by this blood money.

Much of this true story is told in flashback. We see the pre-war “King of the Counterfeiters” as he lives it up in 1936 Berlin. He is a gifted artist, but “why make money by marking art? Earning money by making money is easier.”

But he’s caught. His dollar bills aren’t quite perfect. And behind bars, we see the transition German prisons made, from holding pens for career criminals reformed into a vast engine for wiping out Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables.” And “Sally” is a Jew.

It’s fascinating to think of how someone from a life of crime might be better equipped to handle a concentration camp than a total innocent. Sally is cunning. He has a talent. He figures out first one way, then another, to make himself useful to the guards.

And then he is summoned to a new camp and a special mission. The King of Counterfeiters is to take a job with the Reich, forging Allied money to wreak financial havoc in the homelands of the enemy.

Within that camp, with fellow well-fed and coddled Jewish printers, bankers, paper-makers and the like, Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film takes its moral stand. A “hero” who once rebuffed efforts to help “our people” with “What ‘our people’? I am me and the others are the others” soon allows two barracks full of desperate men to count on him for their survival. Sally makes his deals with Herzog, the ex-cop (Devid Striesow) who once arrested him and now runs “Operation Bernhard.”

“He’s a crook. I can work with him.”

And he fights a war of conscience with Burger (August Diehl), a committed Communist and photo developer who has already lost his family at Auschwitz and is determined to make a stand against his oppressors, even if it is just a symbolic one that gets them all killed.

There isn’t a bad performance in the film. But it hinges on Markovics, utterly convincing as a thief who never betrays an emotion, never gives up his underworld code: Never squeal on a mate. Endure the punishment. Don’t feel guilty about others who don’t.

“I won’t give the Nazis the pleasure of being ashamed I am alive.”

If you go to this Holocaust film expecting tears, “The Counterfeiters” may disappoint. But embrace it for what it is, a thought-provoking, sometimes moving trip into the camps and the dynamics inside this piece of barbed wire, and it will get to you. It’s the genuine article.

"The Counterfeiters" is rated R and is showing at Premiere.