Grüningers Fall

Swiss documentarian Richard Dindo demonstrated his acuity earlier this year in his Charlotte: Life or Theater?, which was part of the MFA's series on Charlotte Salomon, the great German artist martyred by the Nazis. He takes on a far more obscure Holocaust victim in Grüningers Fall ("The Case of Grüninger"). Paul Grüninger was a police captain in the Swiss border town of St. Gall in 1938 when Austria was swallowed by the German Reich. The Swiss government, fearing "Jewification," had already made it illegal for Jews to immigrate into the safe haven of the neutral state, but throngs of desperate refugees stormed the border anyway, and Grüninger was one of the few who permitted them to pass. Soon he was fired, tried, and fined. Rumors spread that he had taken bribes and accepted sexual favors. He died in 1971 in poverty, his pride intact, his honor unvindicated.

Dindo films in the courtroom where, in 1940, Grüninger lost his case. Testifying are some of those he saved, some he worked with, and others who just followed orders -- and everyone seems on trial, not only those who did nothing or could have done more, but those who owed their lives to Grüninger and did nothing to help him. As for Grüninger himself, he appears in TV footage taken a year before his death standing on the bridge over which he let 3000 doomed people cross to safety. Did he regret his actions? "I would do and act," he says, "exactly the same."

-- Peter Keough