Naked Among Wolves falsifies the experience in another way, however. The heroes (including a 32-year-old Armin Mueller-Stahl) are Communists who are planning armed resistance within the camp; they are so noble, however, they endanger their uprising by protecting the Polish-Jewish child. The SS finds out about the boy and use the men's concern for him, and a shrewd combination of physical and psychological torture, to uncover the underground organization. What's lacking is any sense of the dehumanization in Fateless (or in Elie Wiesel's Night, in which a son beats his father to death for a crust of bread). In Naked Among Wolves the men cuddle and feed the child like doting uncles, and it becomes a point of pride to them that they won't choose between protecting him and the uprising. They'll not only outwit and defeat the Nazis, they'll set them an example as well.

The prisoners in Life Is Beautiful at least had their daily task of schlepping anvils. In Naked Among Wolves the prisoners have extraordinary amounts of free time, which they spend engaging in (seemingly well-fed) ethical debates about their situation (as in Arthur Miller's 1980 TV adaptation of Fania Fénelon's Playing for Time). Altogether the movie has the faults that Serge Daney noted in the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust: "extras looking too fat, acting performances, generic humanism, action and melodramatic scenes," except that the humanism is specifically Communist. The take-away is that struggling is superior to brooding--i.e., right-thinking political action is better than words--but of course we're told so in explicit dialogue. Even when a character is left alone in prison while his cellmate is interrogated, we get a stream of words in voice over. (This character reduces to vocables the same endless standing on the parade ground that is so indelibly visualized in Fateless.)

The hidden child in turn becomes unreal, a symbolic means of demonstrating the unconquerable morality and fortitude of the Communists, who, one character tells us, will inevitably take over after the fall of the Third Reich ("What else is there?"). Both sides know the Americans' arrival is only days away and the movie is conceived in terms of the gamesmanship between the prisoners, who delay obeying orders in the hopes of unnerving their captors, and the Nazis, who either want to kill all witnesses or else go easy on them so they'll testify to their leniency when the U.S. Army has taken charge. The head of the camp is worried because he's heard the Allied foreign ministers have agreed to try war criminals. He says, "Maybe I'll be lucky and skim by. Maybe I'll grow a full beard. Maybe I'll be a forester in Bavaria." Then he leans back in his chair and sighs, "But if they get me. I'll always be the commandant at Buchenwald to them," as if to say, Life is so unjust! Only the authoritarian sobriety of the Communist state that made the movie can explain why this line isn't intended to get a laugh. The prisoners for their part have an energy and clear-headedness that doesn't match my experience of hunger, let alone starvation and exposure. Naked Among Wolves, an epic of Soviet-bloc, Remember-the-Alamo! heroism, is as phony as the war was long.