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| The Journey |
A gripping drama of war-time survival,
The Journey tells the story of two teenage sisters, Katarzyna and Elzbieta, who, at the behest of their father, flee Nazi-occupied Poland by volunteering for work in Germany - hoping that they will go unnoticed in the mass of non-Jewish Polish girls travelling there as forced labour.
Armed with false Aryan birth certificates and new identity cards, the pair sets out on a treacherous journey that will take them across Germany to the Ruhr region and the Rhine River near Switzerland, and to war's end.
To survive, the sisters are forced to conceal every detail of their family background to the point of hiding their education and speaking German cleansed of Yiddish inflection. Yet, even this is not enough to prevent them being preyed upon and betrayed.
Based on Ida Fink's celebrated novel,
The Journey (aka
The Last Hide-Out) is a superbly directed and marvellously acted screen drama that succeeds in conveying the precariousness of the sisters' attempt to survive the war.
