Die Unsichtbaren

A drama that seamlessly combines interviews with the last living jewish eyewitnesses with recreated film scenes of berlin in the year 1943. In fact this might be one of the last movies with actual contemporary witnesses. Under the many films that cover the holocaust of the jews and more specific the time when jewish people had to live in the shadows, this film is special because the stories of the contemporary witnesses are so moving and astonishing thrilling. A very moving feature with a focus on positive aspects and some of the last good people in the third Reich.

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.

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.

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.

Die Unsichtbaren / The Invisibles (2017)

This film is absolutely unique; it combines interviews with four remarkable Jewish people that, through all odds, managed to survive the Nazi invasions in Berlin along with a feature film type story that depicts these four as youth in 1943, and also includes vintage clips. The interviews are priceless; the actors are engaging and excellent; and each storyline is intriguing on it's own. Although each of the four stories is separate without intersecting with the others, the narrative is captivating and the film flows along and mesmerizes. Die Unsichtbaren depicts the courage, wits, and resistance of both the Jewish survivors and the German citizens who put themselves in harm's way to help them. I highly recommend this film.