There were a few good Germans

Spokane, as I told Spokane Public Radio listeners, is fortunate to have a number of decent film festivals that, over the course of each year, offer us films that we might not otherwise even hear of.

One of my favorites is the Spokane Jewish Cultural Film Festival, a three-day event that will be held this year at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture. The festival’s opening-night feature, “Saviors in the Night,” will play at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, will be followed on Sunday by a pair of short films – “Black Over White” and “These Are My Names,” which will play at 2 p.m. – and on Monday at 7:30 p.m. by the feature-length “Seven Minutes in Eden.” For information, click here.

“Saviors in the Night” is particularly worth seeing. No, it doesn’t boast anyone you are likely to recognize. It doesn’t explore an exotic locations, being filmed mostly in the flat, pastoral sections of western Germany. It doesn’t follow any grand plot line. Instead, it immerses us in the mundane world of the everyday.

Bread is baked and animals are fed and crops are planted, watered and harvested. Clothes are mended, dinners are prepared, church is attended. And, over the course of two years, life goes on for our protagonists – a village of average, regular people trying to survive as they always have while war rages around and above them.

Into this little footnote to the larger world stumbles Menne, a World War I veteran who is in trouble. Though a winner of the Iron Cross , he is Jewish, thus condemned. He and his family are scheduled to be transported to the East, from which – everyone knows but never talks about – no one returns. Will his friends, his fellow war veterans, help him? As it turns out, yes they will.

For the next two years, Menne – who is short, fat and swarthy, the very physical stereotype of what the Germans in particular disdain – along with his wife and daughter, must hide. Even from some of the village residents, those who wear swastikas on their arms and more than a few who don’t.

It’s easier for Menne’s wife, Marga, and their daughter, Karin, both of whom can pass as Aryan. They are able to hide in the open, working alongside the family of farmer Aschoff and passing as regular German citizens who have been displaced because of the war. Menne, though, has to go from spot to spot, sometimes even sleeping in haylofts. Thus he ends up separated from those he loves the most.

And slowly, but inexorably, time passes. “Saviors in the Night” is no “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg’s masterful 1993 study of Oskar Schindler , the German industrialist who risked his life to save the Jews who worked for him. As powerful as it is, “Schindler’s List” depends on Spielberg’s penchant for grand drama and captivating visuals to move us through the story he wants to tell.

Dutch-born filmmaker Ludi Boeken resorts to no such obviousness. His film, based on Marga Spiegel’s own 1965 memoir, remains grounded in the ordinary – if, of course, your normal life included angry Nazis prowling outside your door and the hum of Allied bombers flying overhead.

But Boeken’s film has another special quality, too. Not that long ago, certainly pre-Spielberg, the very notion of making a film about Germans who helped Jews survive World War II would have been unthinkable. That so few did would seem to whitewash the fact that so many did not. But truth is truth, and Marga Spiegel wanted the world to know hers.

Yes, she had to hide. She felt the terror of a childhood game as it was played out for real. But not all her neighbors were seekers, and only a few meant her any harm. And, in the end, the terror passed. It ended far differently for some Six Million others.