Irena’s Vow review – the extraordinary tale of a real-life Holocaust rescuer

Here is an extraordinary true-life tale. For more than two years during the second world war, a teenager named Irene Gut kept 12 Polish Jews safe from the Nazis, hidden in a basement right under the nose of her boss, a high-ranking Nazi officer. Following the war, Gut emigrated to America and never spoke a word about her wartime experiences until the mid 1970s. Now the story of her remarkable courage and heroism is told very politely in an English-language drama that feels a little too tactful in places to really say anything about the horrors of Nazism.

Sophie Nélisse plays Irena, a Polish trainee nurse forced into slave labour by the Germans following the occupation in 1939, put to work first in a factory then a hotel. Then Nazi officer Rügemer (Dougray Scott) picks her to be his housekeeper – and when she moves in to his sprawling villa, Irena also sneaks in a group of Jewish prisoners whom she has been supervising at the hotel. When Rügemer is out during the day, the hideaways come out of the cellar to help cook and clean – anything to stop him making good on his promise to bring in more staff. The film doesn’t linger too deeply on the experiences of 12 mostly young Jewish people: the terror and the boredom and the tensions they must have felt, crammed in together month after month.

In its weakest moments Irena’s Vow feels shallow; there are scenes of near-misses that should be heart-stopping but fall a little flat. That said, there is a horrible scene in the town, when Irena is forced by German soldiers to view the public hanging of an entire family for harbouring a Jewish man – the youngest child to be executed is only six or seven.

The film gives us a rather saintly portrait of Irena, which is a faintly unsatisfying character treatment. It’s a shame that the most fleshed-out character is the Nazi officer Rügemer, a repulsive man in his 60s whose vanity is puffed up by his uniform and power, and who drinks himself into oblivion to block out the sound of the mass shooting of the town’s Jewish population.