Arising organically in the years preceding it and meshed to five decades of cold war confrontation to which it gave birth, World War II defined the Twentieth Century.  Though at least some European cinema touched on social, non-combatant issues of 1939-45, perhaps because they had lived it -- neorealism’s Open City, for example, and The Shop on Main Street -- the vast majority of celluloid consideration, American or otherwise, was limited to physical aspects of the conflict in the two Theaters of Operation.

Of late, however, and for reasons the province of social historians rather than reviewers, world attention, along with that of filmmakers, has markedly shifted to reassessing one particular aspect, the so-called Final Solution in all its ramifications, as an almost Holocaust industry has grown up.  Encompassing even fiction films “based on fact,” many movies have turned to a pseudo-documentary, passive, objective style absent in earlier war films: from Spielberg’s treatment of Oskar Schindler to Polanski’s of Wladyslaw Szpilman, from failed efforts like a narrated Sophie’s Choice to lesser known fine works like Czechoslovakia’s All My Loved Ones; from reshowings of chestnuts such as the prescient None Shall Escape to Costa-Gavras’ Amen. retooling of the Hochhuth stage play; through a spate of true non-fiction films dealing with heroic or ordinary individuals or entire regions or countries.

Whether a result of collective guilt, of the ever troubling sensitive question of Israel, of a reminder and incentive to Never Again, this very real phenomenon is far from abating.  New considerations of the theme are scheduled to open this summer, and the long-titled Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers During WW II has just been screened in New York.

This latter effort, by 1988 Feature Documentary Oscar-winner Aviva Slesin, recounts the stories of some half dozen Dutch, Belgian, Polish and French Jewish children who were miraculously alive at war’s end, some of the maybe 150,000 who survived of an estimated million-and-a-half.  The director, herself smuggled from a Lithuanian ghetto at the age of nine months and passed off as one of their own offspring by a Christian couple, was one of such “hidden children.”  Meeting her “rescue mother” again after fifty years, she felt driven to make this documentary, to explore “the small pockets of goodness that flourished” amidst evil and chaos and to consider the emotional relationships among children, adoptive families and any surviving biological parents.

Wisely inserting a minimum of archival ghetto footage, Ms. Slesin relies instead on moving childhood photographs, home movies and, primarily, on recent interviews and amateur videos of reunions many years after the fact.  Israel’s Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem, recognizes as the Righteous Among the Nations those non-Jews who endangered their well-being to save Jewish lives during the War, without thought of monetary or other reward.

While it is claimed that some rescue families were abusive or greedy or wanted to convert Jews, and although one biological daughter interviewed here vents feelings of being discriminated against in favor of her Jewish “sibling,” the families emerge as heroic albeit understandably bitter at soon being summarily deprived of the child they had lovingly sheltered at great risk.  Amid present-day shots of country houses, semi-clandestine apartments and small chairs in old-fashioned standing wardrobes, the survivors recount their own painful reentries, physical and emotional scars, troubled relationships with parents who did return from concentration camps and, in one case, a years long insistence on “remaining” Catholic to the point of being baptized.

Callous as it may sound, however, and despite moments of powerful emotion, of love, joy and sadness, Secret Lives does not rise to the level of its charged subject.  Perhaps this is because of the plethora of such films today -- over dinner, TV audiences grew inured to atrocities in Vietnam, while long ago both Camus and Chomsky wrote about the power of sheer logistic numbers to dull emotion and empathy.  Perhaps it is this film’s reliance on what have unfortunately become routine format and features in current non-fiction films.

Or possibly, from parable, morality tale and nursery rhyme on, humans need a story, however simple, on which to hang their hearts.  At nine hours, the French Shoah works by overwhelming its audience.  But Schindler’s List and The Pianist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Diary of Anne Frank, Malle’s Au Revoir, Les Enfants -- all move us to awe, pity and terror precisely because they engage that basic hunger for story.

Critically damned for his effective, wildly successful teleplays Holocaust and Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story, Gerald Green noted the need to “state issues in understandable terms, to personalize history” and, as another observer phrased it, “move the prime-time viewer otherwise uninterested . . .[and] make difficult material more accessible to a mass audience.”  Only some documentaries truly manage this; Secret Lives is not among them. 

(Released by Films Transit International; not rated by MPAA.)