The year is 1942 and Avi a German Jew gets stranded in a Forest as he tries to escape to Switzerland. He is rescued by a Fritz a burly local farmer who provides him with a safe refuge in return for Avi’s help as he has been running his rather isolated farm with just his wife since his last farmhand had been conscripted for war service.Emma, his rather uptight wife is opposed to them harboring a Jew and resents Avi’s presence but as Fritz constantly reminds her, he is the undisputed boss of their household, so she has no choice than accept it. Once a week Fritz takes himself off to the village pub and get drunk playing cards with his cronies whilst he ignores Emma so much so that she has never even had a birthday gift from him, that is until Avi comes along. As he starts to fit into the household, Fritz approaches him with a special request that he expects Avi to agree too in return for being kept safe on the farm.
Fritz is unable to get Emma pregnant and so he very matter-of-factor asks Avi to do it for him so that he can have a son and heir to eventually inherit the farm. To the surly farmer who has no time for emotions or feelings, this is just like a business transaction where everyone will get what they want. Emma however, is extremely reluctant to go along and initially just goes through the motions every time Avi tries to keep his end of the bargain. However as up till now all she has in the way of sex is her older husband’s clumsy perfunctory attempts, she soon warms up to Avi’s visits when she discovers that making love can be really enjoyable.
She quickly gets pregnant but keeps the news from Fritz so she can continuing making out with Avi who by now she is totally besotted with. He is also really getting into, so much so that even Fritz starts to notice the different atmosphere at home. That however will soon come to a very sudden halt when the local Nazi boss turns up and captures Avi and hauls him off.
We learn all this in a series of flashbacks as the story is told 18 years later in Israel by a reluctant Avi who has been confronted by a young German man who has turned up on his doorstep demanding to know the story of how he came to be his father. Emma has just died and the boy is fulfilling one of her last dying wishes and delivering her note to Avi as she asked. He hopes that this will encourage Avi to come clean about what actually happened during the War, and in fact the letter eventually reveals that they were not exactly all what we had imagined.
This rather odd moving story from German first-time filmmaker Franziska Schlotterer carefully avoids any of the brutality of WW2 by just focusing on this remote part of Germany where the most menacing thing is the nosey bumbling solitary local Nazi official. It’s a tale of pure survival which uncannily turns out in a way that neither man had planned or hoped for even though they both entered into it with totally different intentions.
Essentially a three-hander, the drama really rests in the hands of Emma (Brigitte Hobmeier) as the obedient wife who up too now never questioned meekly playing her part in this rather feudal system but who now comes alive when she realizes that there is more to life than just milking the cows and attending to her husband’s every whim in all weathers. It is a touching performance that adds such an interesting dimension to this very unusual wartime experience of a German jew that panned out so much better than the vast majority.
