Parents' Guide to UnBroken (2023)

UnBroken is a personal piece by an enthusiastic and curious Beth Lane. For that reason it feels less like a movie that can be judged for its accuracy and soundness as a piece of history and more like a project that illustrates the outcome when luck and ingenuity combine to save lives in dark times. The siblings recall being baptized in the father's effort to save them from the Jew-hating Nazis, but it's well documented that Nazi policy targeted those who were born Jewish or had a distant Jewish relative. Conversion wouldn't save them. The filmmaker might at least have wondered aloud about the uselessness of the baptisms and clarified the historical facts.

However, in creating a record of aging family voices and memories of people she cares about, she does a great job. She is guided by letters and written memories left by her deceased Uncle Alfons, who served as surrogate father to his sisters when the family was separated from their parents. His is a voice of reason, awe, and gratitude. But sometimes this feels like a school project by a talented and eager student. One cringes when Lane asks a few teenagers sitting on a German sidewalk if they would have hidden her. The question feels abrupt, absurd, and even childish. She just met them. They were not at war. No one was threatening their lives if they were to help a Jew. And yet her innocent audacity pays off in a show of unexpected humanity. A Black youth says he doesn't know for sure, but he would like to think he would hide her because he's a refugee himself and grateful to Germany for taking him in. "It could happen to me," he says.