In the production notes for his Oscar-winning foreign film about Jews pressed into nefarious service by the Nazis, director Stefan Ruzowitzky makes a rather startling claim: “Since Life is Beautiful one can, may and indeed must narrate individual fates which don’t claim to represent all victims.” Presumably, this is a nod to Life’s own Oscar win several years ago; but I suspected there was a bit more behind Ruzowitzky’s assertion than that.

I was therefore glad to have the opportunity, courtesy of a local publicist, to speak with Ruzowitzky over the phone a couple of week prior to the Oscars—and I asked him specifically about Life is Beautiful and Schindler’s List. How, I wanted to know, did these films open new doors for pictures about the Holocaust?

“Whether you like them or not,” he insists, these films represent “milestones” in the genre. List, by taking up the viewpoint of a single Nazi collaborator—and in spite of coming off as more of a “history lesson” than a drama—showed that audiences did not insist on universal experiences of that chapter in human history. (“I preferred the film,” qualifies Ruzowitzky, “when it was ambiguous”—prior to its melodramatic third act.) And Life demonstrated that it was “possible to make even a comedy” the primary point of view.

For The Counterfeiters, that specifically opened up the possibility of telling a tale of the camps from both a privileged and limited point of view: through the eyes of its primary protagonist, counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch (second from right, above). “That was the basic choice,” says the director, “that we have one perspective.” We are not privy to the things Sorowitsch cannot know: the motivations of his captors and tormentors, the strength of will and conviction of his co-forgers, or what’s happening to the less-priveleged Jews on the other side of the very protective walls.

So unlike List’s Amon Goeth, the antagonist here, Herzog, is not revealed to us through inside information. Instead, he’s fictionally based on the first-person recollections of another of the counterfeiters, Adolf Burger (far right, above). So we see in Herzog a man who is “charming, friendly, always good-looking,” says Ruzowitzky: a real “manager-politician” who is fully capable of dreaming up “new, beautiful words” for extermination. And yet the only handle we get on what makes him tick is by examining his character through the lens of the prisoners themselves—and Sorowitsch, specifically, who finds himself in a “situation of being very privileged, which is not [his] choice.”

And Ruzowitzky, being a German who is well aware of both the Nazis’ rise from the Weimar Republic and trends in other republics today, sees a real contemporary relevance to the story of The Counterfeiters. “I’m interested in how a cultivated democracy turns into a regime of terror,” he says—“and this by choice.” The choice of individuals, whether they be the law-breaking of Sorowitsch, the committed non-cooperation of Burger, or the self-interested survival instincts of the Herzogs in the world.

“That why I was fascinated by the topic,” Ruzowitzky elaborates in the film’s production notes. “Is it possible to play ping pong in a concentration camp while a few meters away people are being tortured to death? This is no different than the question: is it possible to take an all-inclusive vacation to a place where people are starving to death nearby? Is it possible to enjoy our rich, sheltered lives in the face of all the suffering in the world?”

Based on the “prurient fascination with evil” that he sees in Germany even today—and recent revelations about America’s War on Terror—Ruzowitsky offered me a concrete answer to his own rhetoric. “If these things continue to proceed in the wrong direction,” he said, “it becomes a disaster.”