Stella Goldschlag had everything to succeed. She was young, blonde, pretty, with stunning blue eyes and she sang like angels. She was the star of a jazz band that covered songs by Cole Porter and other music stars of the 30s and 40s. Stella Goldschlag would have triumphed if she had been born in another time and place. But for a Jewish girl from Berlin in 1940, her city was a cage and her destiny was almost certain death.
For decades, Nazism was a taboo subject for German cinema, which avoided such painful times. The veto began to be lifted in 2004 by Oliver Hirschbiegel, who filmed The Downfall with Bruno Ganz, who became Hitler during his last days in the Berlin bunker. The film, which was as controversial as it was award-winning, won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.
Two years ago, Matti Geschonneck continued along this path with The Conference, a film that delves into one of the most terrible moments of Nazism, the Wannsee conference: the meeting held by the regime's senior officials, with Reinhard Heydrich at the helm, on January 20, 1942 in a mansion in the exclusive Berlin neighborhood of Wannsee where the Final Solution was decreed, the mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers. The conference won the best film award at the 2022 Barcelona Film Fest.
Now it is another German director, Kilian Riedhof, who brings to the big screen one of the thorniest aspects of Nazism, the complicity of some Jews with the Nazis. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote about the collaboration of some Jewish inmates with extermination tasks. His work was also made into a film, in this case by American director Tim Blake Nelson, in The Gray Zone (2001).
Riedhof focuses on another aspect of that phenomenon in Stella. Victim and guilty, which hits Spanish screens tomorrow. The film begins in 1940, when Stella can still sing and dance in public. Her blonde hair, which she dyes thoroughly with the help of her mother, helps hide her Jewish origins. But it doesn't last long. The German director immediately jumps to 1943 when Stella works in an arms factory. She wears a uniform with a yellow star. Shortly after, the girl hides with her parents in a room in Berlin.
Stella deals with false passports and documents. She still goes out. But it is inevitable: the Gestapo detains her and tortures her, but they give her an option to survive, which is that she denounces other Jews. Riedhof puts on the table a moral debate: is it legal to do whatever it takes to survive? Paula Beer's performance as Stella helps the viewer consider this dilemma: Who is Stella, the victim or the executioner? Or both?
The director and his team of scriptwriters have relied on various sources to write the film, such as the book by journalist Takis Würger Stella (Salamandra, 2019) or the summaries of the trials that Goldschlag faced after the war when some of the people he those she had handed over to the Nazis who came out of the extermination camps alive, denounced her.
