Review of My Name Is Sara

Okay, so why do we need one more film about a Holocaust survivor's story? After all, there are literally millions of true Holocaust stories to be told and at least a hundred of them have already been made into much grander productions than this poor boy sandwich (Schindler's List, to name only one obvious example). This is a very personal film that not only looks at the Jewish victim but the dilemma of the Ukrainian farm family she fooled into taking her in. The Nazis were fanatically genocidal toward Jews, but they also brutally terrorized and took everything from the Gentile people whose lands they conquered. This film shows how miserable the Nazis made ordinary Ukrainians, but also shows how Jew-hatred was an intrinsic part of Ukrainian culture long before the Nazis came. Rather than show all Ukrainians as one-dimensional craven Nazi accomplices or one Ukrainian family as the good exception that proves the rule, they were shown as imperfect complex human beings with good and bad qualities just trying to survive in a Nazi-occupied hellscape that took over their lives. It deserves to be added to the library of great Holocaust films, and the fact that nearly everyone involved in creating it was from contemporary Poland is very meaningful.