Black Book revolves around the life of Rachel Stein (played by a Dutch actress Carice van Houten, sounding very much like the good old chocolate brand *sic*), a Jew hiding from the Nazi regime in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. She survived a failed attempt to escape to the liberated southern Netherlands, but her family was wiped out in the SS ambush. She later got herself involved with a resistance group and assumed the alias Ellis de Vries, infiltrating into the Nazi HQ by sleeping with SD officer Ludwig Müntze and working at the Gestapo headquarters in The Hague. The worst part of her espionage mission was when she realised she had fallen in love with Müntze, and being misunderstood for double-crossing her ethnic race and the Nazis.
When the country was liberated, Rachel was imprisoned by the Dutch and publicly humiliated as a traitor. She was rescued by physician/fellow member of the resistance cell Hans Akkermans (who had in fact not only been a traitor, but also responsible for the brutal death of her family at the hands of the Nazis). Akkermans later attempted to murder Rachel with an overdose of insulin when she broke his cover, but she survived by a bar of chocolate and escaped to prove her innocence to resistance member Gerben Kuipers with the titular black book (hence the title of the movie) which contains the names of traitors, salvaged from the coat of Mr Smaal, the traitor lawyer that arranged the Jews' escape to the South.
I walked out pretty shaken - to be reminded of the terrors of war, and Man's insidious ugliness to achieve power. This contrasted with the beautiful scenes of Holland and the recreated 1930s street scenes, that were at the least, simply breathtaking.
A good history lesson for those Singapore urbanites who think we can forget the atrocities WWII atrocities performed by the Japanese and Germans .
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