Questionable Courage

Film Review of "Secret Courage: The Walter Suskind Story"

by Chloe Safier

The inevitable and problematic nature of a historical documentary is that it lacks footnotes. While a book can convey layers of historical truth, a documentary on the same subject lays flat- conveying to the viewer that everything presented is equally verifiable as fact. Thus, the story of German Jews Walter Suskind, told sixty years postmortem by the documentary film team of Tim and Karen Morse, tells us more about the current historiography of the Jewish resistance than about his actual life.

“Secret Courage,” the title of which conveys the bent of the story's presentation, begins with an examination of Jewish life in Holland before the German Invasion, then continues to describe how that life was ghettoized and terrorized by the Nazis after May of 1940. Walter Suskind, the title figure of the film but not the central feature, was a member of the Jewish Council; he was appointed by the Nazis to run the deportation of Jews from Amstredam, funneling them through the Hollandsche Schouwburg Theatre. As he developed close relationships with the Nazi commandants and accrued hatred from the Jewish population, he secretly developed an underground railroad for the children passing through. In cahoots with the director of the day care center, or 'creche', located across the street, Suskind was able to smuggle out an estimated eight hundred to one thousand Dutch Jewish children, saving them from certain death at the camps. Suskind himself was not so lucky- despite his connections and supposed loyalty to the Nazi party; he died in Auschwitz just before the camp was liberated.

The presentation of Suskind's story cultivates the image of a heroic man, who used his 'bad luck' of getting 'forced' by the Nazis to participate in the Jewish Council to levy the lives of nearly a thousand innocent children. The film neglects mention of the Jews deported at Suskind's instruction, and it does not pose the question of whether his gracious act redeemed him; rather, the film insists on his redemption. This is where historical documentary, as a historical document, gets murky. The selected interview subjects (about a half dozen) have only positive things to say about Suskind, despite a narrator who insists he was hated by the majority of the Jewish ghetto and seen as a Nazi collaborator. Memory, too, plays a deceptive role in achieving historical accuracy. The film is best used as an insight into an evolving historiography of the Jews who sided with the Nazis; a few decades ago, a member of the Jewish Council would have been seen as a vicious traitor despite any redemptive acts, and a film like this would never have been made.