There’s a chilling moment in Chanoch Ze’evi’s documentary Hitler’s Children (2011) when Bettina Goering—whose great-uncle Hermann Goering commandedfounded the Gestapo under Adolf Hitler—reveals that she and her brother have had themselves sterilized, so as not to carry out the family line. Such is the burden felt by some people whose ancestors administered the Final Solution, five of whom speak out in this engrossing video. In addition to Goering there are Rainer Hoess (grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of Auschwitz), Katrin Himmler (granddaughter of Heinrich Himmler, an architect of the Holocaust), Monika Goeth (daughter of Amon Goeth, who commanded the Plaszow concentration camp in occupied Poland), and Niklas Frank (son of Hans Frank, Hitler’s governor-general of Poland). Sometimes these people run away from their past and other times they run toward it; but for all of them it’s the great fact of their lives, demanding to be reckoned with.
Cate Shortland, an Australian filmmaker who made an impressive feature debut with Somersault (2004), knits many of these emotional impulses into her long-awaited second film, Lore. Adapted by Robin Mukherjee from The Dark Room, an English novel by Rachel Seiffert, and partly rewritten by Shortland, it tells the story of a budding young woman—rather like the one Abbie Cornish played in Somersault—whose mother and father, a high-ranking Nazi officer, are rounded up by Allied forces as Germany falls in April 1945. Lore, played with great watchful eyes by Saskia Rosendahl, must care for her four younger siblings, and after the children are turned out from the farmhouse where they were left she resolves to lead them through American- and then Russian-occupied territory to reach their grandmother in Hamburg. The film is suspenseful, yet Shortland also takes the time to consider Lore’s awful education as she learns of the death camps and her father’s involvement in them.
Lore ★★★ Directed by Cate Shortland
