Die Unsichtbaren

Josef Goebbels declared Berlin Berlin Judenfrein, cleared of Jews in the fourth year of WWII. And yet 1700 or perhaps more remained, went under ground and survived, thanks to native intelligence and the good Germans who protected them as best as they could. Director Claus Raefle's camera follows four survivors, some alive at the time of production. With a savvy crosscutting of newsreels of the early 40s Berlin, recreation of life clandestinely in the open and interviews with the survivors add a depth of understanding and immediacy of Hitler's race war against German Jews. The narrative is gripping and grim, but uncompromisingly forthright. Time has hardly softened the film's import, for today we see in the media horror stories of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan and sorry to say Israel in the Palestinian occupied territories. We saw in Rwanda and Kosovo., Iraq and Syria, Libya... The novel Gore Vidal spoke of historical amnesia, a truth that is ignored, as events 80 years ago, let alone five years ago seem so distant. Forgetfulness or historical amnesia is a heavy legacy for as Santayana famously said, if you learn nothing from history you're fated to repeat it.

"The Invisibles" is a sanitized version of what could have been an important film about Jews in Berlin who stayed behind and blended in with the rest of the Berliners during WWII. We are told approx. 7,000 Jews evaded capture but that only 1,500 survived to the end of the war. This picture is handsomely produced but is a bloodless rendition of what must have been the case at the time. No violent encounters, no shootings and no sense of the scope of the matter.

The semi-documentary style is distracting, as the actors portray some of the survivors, who are interspersed with the story. Continuity is the casualty as the narrative is repeatedly interrupted to interview those survivors again and again. Well done film that needed some Hollywood 'punch' and some added tension to avoid onscreen blandness.

One reviewer here asks how much more drama can be "squeezed" from this "event". I would answer an infinite amount. There will never be too much that can be said or portrayed about the largest act of genocide, torture and madness. To the already copious number of films on the subject, comes The Invisibles, a docudrama, so labeled with names of the two genres that combine successfully to make up this film. I thought the combination worked extremely well. Having the actual photographic footage of Berlin during the war gave the film an aura of authenticity that enhanced it. Also, the interviewing of the survivors, combined with enactments of what they were reporting, also worked extremely well. In fact, seeing and listening to them made watching the film more bearable for me as I knew they avoided the horrific fate that most of their compatriots didn't. The only reason I rated The Invisibles a 9 and not a 10 was because in a couple of instances I experienced some confusion, mainly about who was who. I think there could have been a bit more clarity in this area. Other than that, the world now has another documentation of something that you'd think happens only in nightmares.

A reviewer incredibly asks how much more drama can be "squeezed" out of the event of nazi rule and the holocaust? The sick of mind are still amongst us. What sort of pathetic human being asks such a question.

A wonderful documentary- drama. These men and women tell their story perfectly. You feel like you are there with them along their monstrous but ultimately successful journey into And out of hell On earth......