Viewing the Nazis Through Their Children’s Eyes

Music Box Films Nele Trebs, left, Saskia Rosendahl, Mika Seidel and Andre Frid in “Lore.

One of the curiosities of the current Academy Award season is that Australia was competing in the best foreign-language film category with a German-language film. Cate Shortland’s “Lore,” a drama about the waning days of World War II, did not pick up a nomination, but it has created a stir everywhere it’s been shown, winning audience awards at festivals on its way to opening in New York on Friday.

Urs Flueeler/European Pressphoto Agency The Australian director Cate Shortland, director of “Lore.”

“Lore,” based on one of the novellas in Rachel Seiffert’s three-part “The Dark Room,” is the story of five young brothers and sisters forced to make their way alone across 500 miles of war-scarred territory to their grandmother’s house after their parents, staunch Nazis, are arrested by Allied troops. During that journey, the title character, a 15-year-old girl, and her siblings meet a young concentration camp survivor, also in flight, who both protects and exploits them.

Ms. Shortland, 44, had previously made one feature-length film, “Somersault,” about a 16-year-old girl from the suburbs of Canberra who runs away from home. So “Lore” was a big leap for her, as she made clear in a recent interview by telephone from Los Angeles, where she was promoting “Lore.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:

You’ve said that you received two copies of Rachel Seiffert’s book almost simultaneously, from two different producers, and took that as an omen. So was your attraction to the story instantaneous once you started reading?

It was instantaneous, but I was really frightened of the material, because of the perspective. I was really frightened of making a film about the perpetrators. I hadn’t seen that before. I really thought about it a lot, but I wasn’t diving right into it. And strangely enough, I’d moved to Johannesburg, because my husband was writing a film set there, and we’ve got African kids. So I think that really helped me.

Really? How so?

Because in South Africa they are grappling with a really horrendous history, in the same way as Germany constantly does, and they deal with it in a really transparent way. I think that if I had been in Australia, it would have been a far bigger labor for me to get into that mind-set.

Your husband comes from a Jewish family with German roots, and you yourself have converted to Judaism. Was there any pushback from within the Jewish community or from Holocaust survivors once it became known you were going to make this film?

I had to fight my own demons and my own perceptions of what German society is. And I also had to fight people reading the script and asking me as a Jew, because I am Jewish, how dare I go there. I got off the phone once really shaken because a man, after he had read the script, said he wished that all of the children in the film would die. So I had to deal with a lot of people’s hurt and anger about what had happened during the Holocaust, and then speak to my husband’s family, who had survived, his mother and grandmother especially. They would continually say to me, “You’re doing it for the right reasons, you have to keep going.”

And for them, what were the right reasons?

To look at what it means to be the child of a perpetrator. Elie Wiesel said a very beautiful thing. He said, “The child of a murderer is not a murderer.” I only heard that recently. I wish I had heard it five years ago, because I think it would have given me a lot of strength.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s interesting to note how this film goes back and forth on that moral dilemma. Spectators are lured into thinking “Oh, poor things, they are just children,” but then Lore or one of the sibling will utter some grotesquely hateful propaganda phrase and so then you think, “Yes, but they are also horrid little Nazis.”

(Laughs) I know, I know. And that was the great thing about the book, that Rachel really leaves it up to the audience to decide what is innate and what is indoctrination. At times people have said to me after they’d seen the film, “I was just getting attached to Lore, and then she would reveal herself, the truth of what she thought.” But the truth is always in her, because she was born into it. It’s like being born into a cult. So she has no other point of reference but National Socialism. That was fascinating to me.

Once you began filming, what was your biggest challenge on the set?

Not speaking German. It was terror. I was the one who fought to make the film in German, and I said I wouldn’t direct it unless I directed it in German. But then when I was given permission to do that, I had to make it work.

The thing that really helped me was that I watched a film about the making of (Alejandro González Iñárritu’s) “Babel.” The director is working with a Palestinian documentary maker, and she was his translator. She was doing simultaneous translation, and it was so fluid. It didn’t slow anything down, and he didn’t change his language, he’s swearing his head off at the kids, and the kids really responded to that. It gave me the courage to treat the kids just like I’d treat any other actor. So we had a simultaneous translation.

And did you swear your head off too?

(Laughs). Not so much, because my son was right next to me.

Now that the film is actually being shown to audiences, have the people who had strong reservations about the theme and how you were going to treat the subject changed their minds?

I’m proud of the film, and I love that it creates a dialogue. We’ve had some really fascinating people come to us, survivors of the camps, both in Germany and then in Australia and the U.K. These are Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, lots of different people. One man said to me that he never wanted to humanize “the other” and he came to this film with an idea of what it would be, and afterwards he had his hand in my hand and he was crying. He said, “I realize that those children also live with massive shame and guilt and anger. Like we did.” I know it’s incredibly different, but it opened his eyes to what those children must have grown up with.

So you believe that people can find the capacity in themselves to feel forgiveness?

You know how in Judaism only the person who has been sinned against can forgive? I actually think that’s very beautiful, because when anybody asks me, it’s never up to me to have any empathy or forgiveness for these people. All I can do is put the story out there and hope that it creates a sense of humanity, and that people perhaps even think a bit about their own lives today. Because we’re still doing it, we’re still dehumanizing and children are still suffering indoctrination and war.