Fake it to make it

>> Stefan Ruzowitzky and Karl Markovics on t
heir bizarre but true WWII concentration
camp drama The Counterfeiters

by MARK SLUTSKY

It sounds like something out of a spy novel: a secret WWII-era Nazi counterfeiting ring faking millions in allied currencies, meant to flood the markets of the U.S. and Britain and collapse their economies. The top-secret project’s base of operations: a concentration camp. The workers: imprisoned Jews, criminals and political dissidents.

The amazing and bizarre true story of Operation Bernhard is the basis of The Counterfeiters, a new film by Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky. The story focuses on Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a Jewish counterfeiter and con artist based on the real-life ex-con Salomon Smolianoff. In the film, it’s the master forger Sorowitsch who the SS rely on for the success of the operation, creating a crisis of conscience for a character who at first seems to be more or less amoral.

Markovics, who along with Ruzowitzky, spoke to the Mirror at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, says of his role, “As an actor of course, everything says yes, yes I want to do this character. But with this subject, you’re thinking, is it only because you want to make a good character and a great movie? But you have to accept that you’re acting in a movie based on a real story. With the historical dimension of the Holocaust, which killed six million Jewish human beings, can you tell this story without any… eidelkeit?”

“Vanity,” Ruzowitzky translates. “Certainly you’re aware that this is a very sensitive issue, especially in Austria and Germany. It’s sort of the most sensitive issue there is, and of course you have a very big responsibility. What helped me a bit was that we’ve been working together with one of the last survivors, Adolf Burger, who’s in the movie as well, and the movie is actually based on his memoirs, and he was reading every draft, and making his remarks. So he’s still alive, and he was reading it and he was very open, because for decades he’s been travelling around giving lectures in schools and telling his story, so he knows that it’s important to tell the story in a way that people will listen. He was very open to changes, which you do have to make, making a movie, to make it accessible, in a way.”

A crook’s conscience

It raises the question of why the film focuses on Markovics’s character and not specifically Burger’s (who does play a strong supporting role as the film’s conscience). “When I heard the story for the first time I thought right away what I’m interested in, is a crook, a counterfeiter, in the concentration camp,” Ruzowitzky explains. “That’s something I haven’t heard before, and well, you think, that’s an interesting story. Whereas Burger’s story—this sounds a bit cynical—he was a resistance fighter, a communist, was arrested for printing flyers against the Nazis, this is sort of a typical story. Doing research and reading memoirs from former inmates, all these memoirs have been written by intellectuals, by people coming from a very settled, bourgeois background. Salomon Smolianoff was a jailbird. That’s another background. And a jailbird will react differently. He knows the tricks and how to survive in such an environment.”

And eventually, he grows something of a conscience. “When we start and get to know him he comes across as somebody without any morals and without any ideals,” Ruzowitzky says. “But we, and he as well, learn that he has ideals. They don’t have anything to do with laws or whatever, but in terms of solidarity and not betraying your comrades, he has a lot of ideals.”

In the film, the prisoners who cooperate with Operation Bernhard are given a marginally better standard of living, enough at least to keep them alive in an environment as hostile to life as a concentration camp, as well as some strange rewards—a night of music and dancing, and perhaps most absurdly, a ping pong table. “You can assume that all the details that seem the most absurd are authentic,” Ruzowitzky says. “Sometimes we even had to tone it down a little bit because it would have been over the top otherwise. Like they had these dancing evenings not once, but once a month!”

“They had a ping pong competition with the SS Wardens,” Markovics chimes in. “And they never knew whether to let them win!”

“Burger said once he won against an SS guy and everybody was saying ‘Are you crazy, you can’t defeat one of them!’” Ruzowitzky says. “This is one thing that I didn’t dare to show, because nobody would have believed that. So in that case reality was more absurd or more bizarre than what we could have shown.”

The Counterfeiters opens
this Friday, Feb. 22