Review of “I Have Never Forgotten You”
When 37 year-old Simon Wiesenthal walked out through the gates of the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945 he weighed less than 45 kilograms. He had lost nearly every member of his family in the genocidal violence that first the Soviets and then the Nazis perpetrated as they occupied his hometown – now part of the independent Ukraine. It was no doubt the intensity of his existence during the war years, including a forced march from death camps in Poland to Austria and several near misses with execution, which forged his inability to forget what had happened. A successful architect before the war and miraculously re-united with his wife Cyla after it, moving on would have been an understandable option. Yet he spent the remainder of his long life carefully pursuing the men and women who had been responsible for the atrocities he had survived.
The documentary – narrated unfussily by Nicole Kidman - traces Wiesenthal’s life mainly through a series of interviews that he gave to various television networks when he was famously known as ‘The Nazi Hunter.’ These are supplemented with comments from his daughter Paulinka, and plenty of archival footage. It’s a fairly factual affair, more tribute than exploration, with a focus in its middle section on some of Wiesenthal’s most famous successes. Each of these is a huge story in its own right: Adolf Eichmann, who managed the supply-chain of Jews to death camps; Karl Silberbauer, who arrested Anne Frank; Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka; and the infamous Hermine Braunsteiner, who stomped her victims to death, and who Wiesenthal tracked down to a New York suburb in 1968.
Yet little from these stories, or the interviews with his daughter or biographer provide any real insight to the inner workings of this extraordinary man. It is only with a few words from actor Ben Kingsley that we see a glimpse of the energy of grief that drove him. Kingsley met Wiesenthal when he had to characterise him in a film version of Wiesenthal’s best selling book Murderers Among Us, and the interview with Kingsley is spellbinding. You can’t help feeling that Kingsley – as talented actors do – developed a much richer sense of the man than the makers of this documentary. There are many moments begging for deeper exploration – and Wiesenthal’s famous Sunflower story – which he described as a turning point in his life and one that fuelled his quest for the nature of forgiveness – is not mentioned. It’s never dull however, relying upon our fascination with this horrific chapter of modern history.
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