Nothing says happy Hanukah like a Holocaust-themed movie, especially if it ends on a feelgood note of survival and reunion after a run of tragic deaths and lashings of suffering. But this Israeli-Belarusian co-production is so excessively sentimental, cliche-riddled and arguably hypocritical considering its provenance, it’s not easy to forbear.
It opens in contemporary Tel Aviv with an elderly man named Ilya receiving news he can barely believe is true: someone dear to him from his childhood is alive. This prompts Ilya to tell his grandsons for the first time about what happened to him during the second world war. Desaturated cinematography then unfolds his story in flashback, showing young Ilya (Andrey Davidyuk) and his little brother Sasha as preteen Jewish boys living in Minsk with their parents, just as the war starts. Dad goes off to the front and is never seen again; the brothers and their mother are soon rounded up by the Nazis, represented by one German actor (Jean-Marc Birkholz) who keeps cropping up throughout to ruin life for Ilya. It’s as if the production didn’t have enough budget to afford a second German-speaking actor or (charitably) because the film-makers are making some kind of symbolic point about the banality – or in this case indistinguishability – of evil. I suspect the former is the case.
After a spell in a concentration camp for children, Ilya is separated from his brother and ends up living with a Belarusian couple who lost their own son. Despite the risk of execution they’re incurring by sheltering a Jewish boy, the couple treat Ilya like their own son, and the man gives him a home-whittled wooden stork that Ilya promises to give to his little brother one day.
There are a few Belarusians who side with the Nazis, and Soviet-affiliated partisans steal the family’s cow, but by and large the film paints a very ahistorical, excessively flattering portrait of ordinary Belarusians, who are mostly keen to help these poor orphaned Jewish kids even if they’re risking being murdered themselves. Elderly Ilya’s voiceover narration even says at one point: “But even knowing the consequences, none of the locals refused [to help hide people].” There’s some serious nationalist self-soothing in the way this film depicts its locals as entirely saintly, which, given Belarus’s alliance with Putin these days, really stinks.
