Maartje: (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about Winter in Wartime, or Oorlogswinter, which came out in 2008. It’s a Dutch movie that was directed by Martin Koolhoven with a screenplay by Mieke de Jong and Paul Jan Nelissen, and Martin Koolhoven also wrote on it. It’s based on the famous youth novel Oorlogswinter, which came out in 1972 and was written by Jan Terlouw. It follows a Dutch boy during the Dutch Famine of 1944 and 1945 as he becomes responsible for the care of a downed RAF pilot. It was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination, but it was not actually nominated, which I think is a shame.

It’s available on several streaming platforms in the Netherlands. What did you think of this movie, Sam?

Sam: (01:02)
I also watched it on a streaming service in the Netherlands via a VPN. Hey.

Maartje: (01:08)
All right.

Sam: (01:09)
I enjoyed it. I would say that I thought some parts of it veered into melodrama a little bit. Like I think the first half of the movie is a little stronger than the second half. There are some predictable subplots, you know, the pilot and the older sister and that kind of stuff. And towards the end there are some things that happen to this thirteen year old boy, or some things that he does, that you’re like, I don’t know, this might be a little implausible. But it’s really beautifully shot. Like I think it’s really impactful that it is set in the winter. You can just feel how cold and miserable it is, just whiling away the hours waiting for the Nazis to go away. You know, at this point the Netherlands has been occupied by the Germans for four years or so and it’s starting to get real long in the tooth and everyone’s just waiting for the war to end. And I thought that the child actor was particularly strong. What about you?

Maartje: (02:02)
I read this book when I was a teenager in Dutch, and then just now again for the podcast, being very much an adult, and you can tell that it’s definitely a children’s book that deals with some very mature subjects. You know, how do you tell a story about World War Two in a children’s book? And the movie kind of takes that book and takes it from a children’s book to maybe a teen story, like an older teen story. It’s slightly more mature than the book is. Some of the choices that have been made for the movie are a little more dramatic than the book is. The book is very straightforward. It’s very this is the plot. It’s fairly simple. You can see what’s coming a mile ahead. In the movie I think as an adult I enjoy the movie more than the book, but the book is such a beloved classic that I do have a soft spot for the book as well. More like out of nostalgia I think than the fact that it’s a great book. So I enjoyed it a lot.

Sam: (03:11)
Yeah, there’s something interesting in the fact, and we talked about this a little bit when we talked about The Book Thief, I think, where children’s literature is really fearless about diving into topics that people might term mature, you know, death and loss and violence and all kinds of stuff like that that we would consider adult content. And I think people feel the need to pull back from that a little bit a lot of the time when they adapt those books into movies. And that’s not necessarily the case here, certainly not throughout. But it’s really interesting to me how kids in particular love to read books where there are these child heroes who get to experience the world in the way that an adult does. And then as adults we’re like, no, kids are not equipped to deal with that. And you really see that a lot more in movies than you do in the book usually. So yeah, that’s definitely interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk more about that as we go through.

Maartje: (04:05)
There is another interesting change from the book to the movie where the book focuses a lot more on the famine and I would like maybe to explain a little bit about the Dutch famine in wartime, just to give you more of an idea. We see some of it in the movie, but in the book it’s pretty much always there in a way it isn’t in a movie. So this famine in the Netherlands was known as the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944 and 1945, and it occurred primarily in the north of the Netherlands in the more densely populated areas, so the big cities. It was more or less a direct result of the failed Operation Market Garden in September 1944, and it lasted pretty much until German surrender in May of 1945. So that’s a good long winter to be hungry.

And the cause of the famine at that point was more or less a combination of a Dutch railway strike on September 17th, which was the start of Market Garden, and they were hoping that by striking they could help the Allied invasion, as the railway was controlled obviously by the Germans. And then the Germans put an embargo on food as a retaliation. And even though the embargo was lifted in November of the same year, the railway service didn’t resume until the very end of the war. And the Germans had confiscated most of the farmland for military use and to feed their own men. And about 20,000 men in the Netherlands were sent away to work in Germany, so agriculture and transportation basically came to a halt. And before this there had been a food rationing system already in place, which amounted to about 1,400 calories a day per person. Which then dropped to 750 by November of 1944 and then even lower to about 400 in the spring of 1945. So if a normal person would have to eat 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day, 400 is not a lot. People were actually starving quite badly.

Sam: (06:18)
Just to run the basic systems of your body, even if you lay down and do nothing all day, you need like 1,200 or 1,300 calories. So it’s like if you’re planning on getting up and doing work and taking care of the kids and living your life, you need even more calories than that.

Maartje: (06:32)
Yeah, so people who were deemed essential workers did get a little bit more, but still not enough to function like a normal person. And before the war was over, in April of 1945, an agreement was reached between the German occupiers and the Allied forces, which resulted in the massive food drops known as Operation Manna by the British and Operation Chowhound by the Americans.

Sam: (06:59)
I also would just like to drop in super quickly that the RCAF also flew in Operation Manna. Canada mentioned.

Maartje: (07:06)
Thank God for Canada. Right? And an estimated 20,000 people died as a direct result of the famine. Which sounds like a lot. And then you look at what happened in Greece where it’s like 300,000 people died of famine. So famine was terrible everywhere.

Sam: (07:23)
Yeah, it’s definitely a grim backdrop to the movie, to be sure.

Maartje: (07:28)
Yeah, and it’s in a movie, but in the book it’s much more prevalent, especially as our main character — he gets food for the downed pilot in this movie, but you don’t really see him going through a whole lot of trouble to get this food. But in the book he does a bunch of stuff. He fixes carts for people, he does stuff to earn money so he can then buy food. Which is — they’re in basically my neck of the woods, which is not in a big city, so they would have had food, but still not a lot.

Sam: (08:01)
Right. What’s the cultural relationship with this book and the Netherlands? Like you mentioned that you had read it before.

Maartje: (08:06)
Yeah. I don’t know if it’s still used as mandatory reading in schools but I think a lot of young people, at least of my generation — I think mostly everyone has read it. And I don’t know if they still do it. I hope they do because it’s an adventure book that also happens to teach a lot of interesting messages for kids to understand. I can’t remember what age I was when I first read it, but I feel like you have to be eleven, twelve, maybe ten if you’re well read as a kid. And then you can read it up till you’re probably about sixteen and after that it becomes a children’s book to you.

Sam: (08:47)
Yeah.

Maartje: (08:48)
Yeah. So yeah, pretty significant. Also, this author has gone on to write a lot more other influential children’s books. He was eight at the time of the war. So the experiences of this child in the book are more or less his, although the child in the book is slightly older. So most of this happened in some form or another, which is I think always a really interesting thing to realise.

Sam: (09:17)
Yeah, we’ve done a lot of sort of novelisations of autobiographies, like novelised memoirs, I guess. I always find that super interesting how people choose to write fiction so they can play a little more fast and loose or take a little more artistic licence.

Maartje: (09:33)
Yes, and I think he aged up the main character just to give him a little bit more freedom than an eight year old boy would have had, to let him move around the city and do stuff. Because if you’re eight, your mother’s not going to let you go anywhere.

Sam: (09:50)
Right. Yeah, that makes sense.

Maartje: (09:51)
Anyway, are you ready to get into the plot?

Sam: (09:53)
Yeah. We start in the Netherlands in January of 1945. Michiel, played by Martijn Lakemeier, watches an English plane go down in a field from his window. A German soldier searches for the pilot in the woods. The pilot is dangling from a parachute and he shoots the German soldier from above. And this is an incident that will circle back to haunt everyone later.

Maartje: (10:28)
Indeed it will. So in the book this is not exactly what happened, but I won’t like spoil it for everyone because if you want to read the book it’s slightly more complicated than just this pilot shooting this German soldier. It’s more roundabout and it haunts him quite a bit more than in the movie.

The next day Michiel and his neighbour and friend Theo, played by Jesse van Driel, go looking for the plane themselves because they know it’s in the field and they’re boys and they’re excited, but they’re also not supposed to be there, so they’re chased off by Germans and they get away at first. And then a little bit later, I guess in the same day, Michiel is apprehended and taken to whoever is in control of the town and his father, who’s also the mayor, has to come and get him. And in the scene where he gets caught, you can actually see people walking into the village. And in the book, there’s people from all over the country coming east because there is talk that there might be food in the east. So in the book there’s constantly people over at their house who they call quote unquote family — they’re not family, but they just keep taking people in to give them food.

Sam: (11:48)
Yeah, I’m actually glad that you said that because there is a brief moment where that happens in the movie and then it never gets addressed again. And I was like, I don’t know who these people are.

Maartje: (11:58)
No, so those are the quote unquote family members that aren’t real family, but they just come from all over the place — they’ll have been walking for like a day or so from Amsterdam to get there and they’re all like freezing and sad. So this family takes them in.

Sam: (12:15)
Yeah. Crucially here too, we see that Michiel has a chance to give up his friend Theo and he doesn’t do it. So this is really foundational to his character as the movie carries on, that he can keep secrets. And I think also in this scene where we see them try to take souvenirs from this downed bomber — he gets in a little bit of trouble, but not too much. Like, we’re really getting a sense of them as kids, right? Let’s get a cool souvenir from this bomber. And then he does get in trouble, but the Germans don’t take it too seriously. They certainly don’t take it as seriously as they would if he were an adult, because then they would view him as having suspicious motives. But he’s a kid, so they’re like, he’s just doing kid stuff. And as he’s riding his bike around, he has a little card stuck in the wheel so that it makes like a motor sound. This is really setting up him as a child and he’s in this period in his life where he’s very naive and he doesn’t know a lot about the world yet. And then that’s about to change throughout the movie.

Maartje: (13:19)
That’s very different from the book. Like in the book, we don’t see the plane. He doesn’t go look for the plane. The book opens with him during curfew, or as it’s almost curfew — there was a curfew at eight o’clock at night when he had to be inside. He’s taking I think two bottles of milk or something for his mum. And it’s dark and he breaks it. And he’s worried he’ll get in trouble with his mother for breaking the milk. So it’s a very different sort of — he doesn’t get to be playful in the book. It’s immediately war and everything is terrible.

Sam: (13:55)
He immediately has more adult responsibilities.

Maartje: (13:58)
Yes. And I think he also doesn’t get in as much trouble as he would’ve because his dad is the mayor.

Sam: (14:05)
Right, of course, yeah. And we will get to see as well his dad kind of glad-handing with the Nazis a little bit, which we’ll definitely talk about more, but it’s a very complicated situation that their family finds themselves in.

Maartje: (14:17)
Which is also more thought out in the movie than it is in the book, which I thought was really interesting because it seems like such a bleak thing to do, to have this moral grapple with who this dad is and his responsibilities. But it’s clearer in the movie than it is in the book. So interesting choice.

Sam: (14:38)
Yeah, I like that. It’s true — sometimes we’ve definitely watched movies for the podcast where the screenwriter picks out a theme from the book that they think is important and they do a much better job with it than the original author.

Maartje: (14:50)
Yeah, for sure. Michiel’s relationship with his father in the movie is much more tense than in the book. So Michiel thinks in black and white, right? He thinks the Germans are bad, I have to hate them immediately. Everything they do is evil. There’s no middle ground there. And obviously his father has different responsibilities in the town and he’s doing things for different reasons than Michiel would be doing — obviously because he’s a child. They do still think in black and white sometimes. So yeah. It’s interesting.

Sam: (15:29)
Yeah, definitely. I really liked the relationship between him and his father. I thought that one was one of the more interesting ones. Because yeah, I mean, his dad — if you’re a kid and you see your dad being kind to Nazis, you immediately are like, he’s a coward, he’s a suck-up. But his dad knows that by playing nice with these people, maybe he can negotiate freedom for some of his neighbours that get taken away. Maybe he can negotiate certain other privileges, or help his family and friends and his neighbours. He understands that if he were to step out of line, that might get him killed and it wouldn’t help anyone. But if he’s able to play the game a little bit and walk the line with these people, maybe he can benefit the people in his community. And that’s a really hard thing to understand when you’re a kid, when you think you’re supposed to stand up to bullies.

Maartje: (16:18)
I don’t think I understood it as a kid in the book. I was like, why, dad? Why aren’t you as mad as I am at these people? But yeah, so I feel like the movie did a good job at trusting that kids can understand this as well. You said it probably when we did the intro — we think kids can’t handle it, but kids are much smarter than we think they are.

Sam: (16:44)
Yeah, for sure.

Maartje: (16:45)
So to kind of offset Michiel’s relationship with his father, we get the intro of Uncle Ben — not to be confused with Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben — who’s played by Yorick van Wageningen, who has for a long time been playing a lot of roles in big Hollywood movies, tiny roles, but he’s pretty famous for a Dutch guy. And his Uncle Ben arrives after having to leave Amsterdam because there were raids. I don’t know if that’s actually an English word. Is it?

Sam: (17:19)
I don’t know it.

Maartje: (17:20)
Basically it’s like a pogrom. It’s like the Germans just doing raids on people. And you can tell immediately that Michiel loves this guy. They’re really close. And upon his arrival, Michiel learns that Uncle Ben is part of the resistance because he’s got this big suitcase full of coupons for food and all sorts of stuff that he shouldn’t be having. So he’s a big fan of Uncle Ben immediately. And he also sees his father refusing to help Uncle Ben. And he actually — Ben calls his father a… I forgot the Dutch word, but it means like loose ballsack if you were to translate it.

Sam: (18:02)
Yeah, and you know what’s funny? Thinking back on this now, after we — spoilers — know what it turns out to be true about Uncle Ben later — isn’t it just a little too easy that all of his resistance stuff is just there, easily found in his suitcase for anyone who cares to look?

Maartje: (18:18)
Yes. Yes. And I think it’s done on purpose in the movie too, that Uncle Ben is staying in the same room as Michiel, which he’s not in the book. So he’s slightly more removed from Michiel in the book and Michiel looks up to him as his hero, but it’s not quite as obviously being a hero.

Sam: (18:38)
You know what else I loved? When Michiel opens the suitcase and then there’s all this paperwork in there that shows that Uncle Ben’s in the resistance. And then the English subtitle just says “resistance paper.”

Maartje: (18:52)
It is quite on the nose. And there’s a radio in there as well. So in the next scene you’re immediately listening to Radio Oranje, I think it was called, which is the Dutch broadcasting from London.

Sam: (19:04)
And you’re like, hmm, if Ben were really in the resistance, he would probably be a little more careful with his radio, which is illegal for him to have.

Maartje: (19:11)
He’s also in the mayor’s house where you can imagine maybe sometimes there could be Germans just knocking on doors because they talk to the mayor a lot.

Sam: (19:20)
Yeah, exactly. Theo’s older brother Dirk, played by Mees Peijnenburg, entrusts Michiel with an important letter that he must deliver in case Dirk doesn’t return from a sabotage raid upon a nearby arms depot. It is wild that you would entrust this to your little brother’s friend, but he does. So that night, the neighbour’s house is raided by the Germans, and Dirk is arrested. Michiel’s dad intervenes, he tries to kind of smooth things over, but it immediately becomes clear that Michiel is going to have to undertake the task of delivering this letter.

Maartje: (19:54)
Yes. And he’s very hesitant about it immediately. I do like that they let him be insecure about what he has to do, and I like that about it. It’s a change from the book, by the way, because in the book the raid was on a distributions office. So basically I think that’s the office that would be in charge of handing out food and rations. So again the Hunger Winter theme is less prevalent in the movie than it is in the book. And also the munitions depot — much cooler, obviously. It’s like, ooh, weapons. Dirk in the book has a much bigger role. Like we see him only once in this movie, he has maybe two lines and then we see him again at the very end. But in the book he’s a prominent character. He does get arrested but he also escapes later and he doesn’t in the movie. So yeah.

When Michiel goes to deliver the letter to the guy he’s supposed to hand it off to, they’re interrupted by a man named Schafter, played by Ad van Kempen, who they’re instantly suspicious of as he is friendly with the occupiers. It’s kind of this — sorry to say — collaborator-looking man that’s always looking at other people and sort of side-eyeing everyone and you’re like, what’s he up to?

Sam: (21:10)
Resting collaborator face.

Maartje: (21:13)
Yes. So the guy that he’s supposed to deliver the letter to is like, you have to come back later, I don’t have time to help you right now. And then Michiel kind of goes over to ride his horse — and we don’t know where he gets this horse, he just goes to stables and he has a horse. But it’s explained in the book, and he also doesn’t have the horse until something happens in the book that he needs a horse for, but I’ll explain that later. But anyway, he returns as intended just to see this man being shot as he’s running away from the Germans. So the guy you were supposed to hand over the letter to is no longer alive, which is not good. And that’s when he decides to read the letter himself. And learns of a downed airman’s hiding place in the woods.

Sam: (22:06)
Yeah. We have to mention the horse. His name is Caesar, and early on in the movie I was like, if Caesar dies we riot, and then you just responded, and I was like, no…

Maartje: (22:17)
I don’t remember him dying in the book but he must have because the pilot has to do something to the horse. So that must have happened in the book, but I just can’t remember. So I wasn’t as sad about it as I was in the movie.

Sam: (22:34)
Relevant, damn it. This is a horse movie.

Maartje: (22:36)
Yes. I know.

Sam: (22:38)
So this downed airman from the British bomber — his name is Jack, he’s played by Jamie Campbell Bower. He is wounded and starving, and he’s huddled up in this little hole in the ground in the woods. Michiel takes it upon himself to help him and he hatches a plan to get him over the river IJssel to Zwolle, where Jack knows someone who’ll be able to help him get away. Michiel knows that the Germans stationed at the ferry have tea every day at three, so that’s their chance to kind of sneak Jack on and get him across the river. But on the day they’re meant to go, Jack’s leg wound, which he sustained when his plane went down, is all infected and he’s feverish and he definitely can’t travel.

Maartje: (23:19)
No. So in the book this ferry thing happens near this big manor house, which is in the movie — the house is there — but the house is owned in the book by a baroness. And the baroness pretends to be really chummy with the Germans, but she also keeps them for tea for half an hour. So she’s the one who makes possible this entire escape thing for many people. In the book actually, Michiel helps two Jewish people escape over the river before he ever gets there with Jack. He’s not even supposed to take Jack over the river at all, so they kind of conflated those two storylines. And that’s how he gets the horse, because the horse belongs to the baroness. Which is why we see him at the stables. I do wonder if they originally intended to include that and cut it for time or something. But this baroness didn’t exist in real life, but another lady who was not a baroness did exist and do this. So it’s pretty cool.

Sam: (24:18)
That is really cool. I do wish they’d included that just because I like when stories about women in the resistance get told, you know?

Maartje: (24:26)
Yeah, I wonder if they didn’t because she gets ratted out to the Germans and refuses to leave her house, has a shotgun, shoots at the Germans, and then they bring in a tank and destroy the house with her in it. So I wonder if they didn’t want to do that.

Sam: (24:44)
I mean, what a truly badass way to go out though.

Maartje: (24:47)
Yeah. Like she sends out all her staff and all her family members and she’s the only one left in the house as they blow it up.

Sam: (24:55)
Oh my god. Just imagine being like, yeah. The Germans needed a whole tank to take me out.

Maartje: (25:02)
They made a TV show in the seventies based on this book — twelve parts of half an hour — and she’s in that, so I look forward to watching that.

Sam: (25:14)
Definitely. Do you know her name? Did you say it already?

Maartje: (25:16)
No. For the book, I don’t think I know. Do you know her real name?

Sam: (25:18)
Do you know the real lady’s name?

Maartje: (25:20)
No, because apparently it’s like the author’s publisher’s grandmother who did this and he doesn’t name her, so I don’t know what her name was.

Sam: (25:30)
Gotcha. Okay.

Maartje: (25:31)
But this was in the next town over from my town, so this is right next door for me.

Sam: (25:36)
Wow, that’s wild.

Maartje: (25:37)
Yeah. Because Jack’s leg wound is badly infected, Michiel gets his sister Erika, played by Melody Klaver, who’s a nurse, involved — and you can already see where this is going. On their way to the hideout they’re seen by Schafter, which is the suspicious looking man from before. But they press on to the hideout, they’re on their bikes, they have an excuse to be there. And immediately you can tell that she and Jack have a thing. And Jack gives Michiel a letter to take to England to his mother. And that’s when Michiel is like, yes, I know how to do that — when he really doesn’t know how to do that. And he decides to trust Uncle Ben with that responsibility, which is maybe not the smartest idea, but we don’t know that yet.

Sam: (26:31)
Yeah. The way that Michiel is kind of jealous of Jack and his sister in this really childlike way — like he wants to have this pilot all to himself because he’s his responsibility.

Maartje: (26:43)
He’s mine, he’s my responsibility.

Sam: (26:46)
Exactly. Yeah, it’s kind of sweet and it just really drives home the point that yeah, this is like a child, you know, this is a kid. For all that he’s doing, taking on these very adult responsibilities, he is not an adult.

Maartje: (26:59)
Yeah, I think he’s fifteen going on sixteen in the book or something. Or he starts off younger and then by the end he’s like sixteen. But I do really like this brother-sister relationship. It’s so true to young children — where they’re just absolutely annoying to each other. And another thing I like is that Michiel tries to talk English to Jack. And it’s absolutely childish English and it’s so funny to me.

Sam: (27:28)
What really made me laugh too is that they still subtitled his English speaking, but he would say it in broken English and the subtitle would be in perfect English.

Maartje: (27:37)
Yes. I know, it’s really funny. Like he would use words that are officially Dutch but you can understand them in English if you want. I really like how they did that. Because I read the book in English this time and it doesn’t really work because all the dialogue is just in regular English. So you’re like, well what’s going on? Are they speaking Dutch? Are they speaking English? I don’t know.

Sam: (28:03)
Right.

Maartje: (28:03)
And in the book actually Jack learns Dutch because Michiel brings him these books from home because he thinks he must be bored. So he brings him a dictionary and then he brings him a book about something really stupid and medical, and Jack has no idea what any of it says because it’s in Dutch. But it’s really quite sweet.

Sam: (28:25)
Amazing. On their second escape attempt — so again Michiel trying to get Jack out of the woods — this time the woods are full of German soldiers. Michiel loses Jack as they try to make their escape from the soldiers, but he returns to the hideout. The Germans find the German soldier that Jack had shot back in the first scene where we saw him dangling from his parachute, and now they want to find the killer. And we know this is bad news for everyone in Michiel’s little town because the Germans, as soon as they find a dead German soldier, they just assume that it was someone in the village, someone’s been traitorous to the regime, and so they’re going to stop at nothing to find out who did it.

Maartje: (29:04)
Yeah, bad news. And in the book this is a much more complicated riddle as to who shot the German and why there’s even confusion about who shot him — but maybe I’ll tell it at the very end, because it’s funny. On his way home one day, Michiel falls through the ice when he’s riding his bike over the IJssel. Why would you do that, my good sir? But then as he’s fallen through the ice, he’s saved by a German soldier, and it kind of rocks him to his core because he’s like, wait, this guy saved my life, now I don’t know if I should hate him or not. And they take him to the makeshift hospital where his sister works and his mother also works. So that’s another change because in the book his mother is just the mayor’s wife and they gave her something to do in this movie, which I think is nice.

Sam: (30:04)
The way I assumed that the body of water that he fell through was a canal.

Maartje: (30:08)
I mean that’s fair. Maybe it was. It’s another change from the book because in the book Michiel has a tiny little innocent brother who climbs onto the roof because he’s a child, and a German soldier risks his life to save this little boy, and it causes a whole commotion and this soldier is really, really nice. So they’re like, I don’t know how to feel about this.

Sam: (30:32)
I think it must be a canal because if the river were frozen they could just walk across it. They wouldn’t need the ferry.

Maartje: (30:37)
Ooh, you are so much smarter than I am.

Sam: (30:40)
The way I just thought through it — I was like, why did I think it was a canal? And then I thought through it and I was like, that’s why.

Maartje: (30:46)
It probably is. I don’t know. We don’t have — well, I guess we do have canals around here. I should stop lying about my own hometown.

Sam: (30:55)
I literally — I’m sure I initially assumed it was a canal because it was the Netherlands and I’m like, you all are chock full of canals.

Maartje: (31:02)
Yes. And I also thought — in the movie it’s kind of weird because you see loads of people walking out all the time, you’re like, why are there so many people out on the streets? But it’s because these people are coming in from the north to try and save their families and get food for their families, and it’s never explained.

Sam: (31:21)
Yes. And anyone who did have a vehicle wouldn’t have gasoline for it because the Germans would be using all the available gasoline at this point.

Maartje: (31:30)
They’re also, by the way, riding bikes with wooden wheels on them because there were no regular wheels anymore.

Sam: (31:37)
Right? Rubber for the war effort.

Maartje: (31:39)
Yes. Michiel’s father gets taken by the Germans in retaliation for the death of the German soldier in the woods. So the Germans don’t know who killed the soldier in the woods, but they figure they’re going to make an example out of somebody, so they take his father and they take a couple of other guys. Uncle Ben says that he’ll get him released, but then the next day, unfortunately, Michiel’s father is executed by firing squad.

Sam: (32:02)
It’s very dramatic. In the book Michiel just hears about this. In the movie he witnesses the death of his father. And before this scene they’ve had this really sweet scene where his father teaches him how to shave. And I thought it was so cute.

Maartje: (32:22)
Yes. This is a part too where we get to see him start to understand a little bit more about what kind of man his father is, because as we discussed before, he doesn’t understand that his dad is trying to get along with the Nazis to keep people alive and just keep their community safe until the war ends. And then when he sees that his father is willing to give his life for his community — I mean, that is a huge step on his way towards adulthood and understanding what it means to be a grown-up and having to navigate difficult things. And even just before this is when we see him take the card out of the spokes of his bike wheel, because he no longer wants it to sound like a motor — now he needs to be quiet while he’s moving through the woods. Now he has these adult responsibilities. He’s not getting to be a kid and doing this fun stuff anymore. So I did like to see the evolution of that through the movie.

Maartje: (33:19)
They do it so well in the movie. It’s not nearly as pronounced in the book. Also they don’t shy away from violence in the movie. We don’t get to see his father die in the book. Like it just happens, you get told about it and then everybody’s crying. On the other hand, they left out some scenes that were also very explicit in the book that didn’t make it to the movie, which is notably that the guy who was arrested on the raid of the munitions depot — he escapes while being deported and he comes back to the hideout and tells them of his torture by the SS in very grave detail. The book describes all his injuries. And like his feet aren’t straight and he can’t walk and his eye is swollen shut and it’s horrible. So they left all that out but they put in that Michiel sees his father die and we see his father die as well. They don’t even show it off screen — they show it.

Sam: (34:21)
Yeah, he does have a slow-mo running moment where he’s going to stop the execution in the nick of time, but some soldiers grab him and then you hear the gunfire. Yeah.

Maartje: (34:32)
Yeah. I do actually — I like the idea of the not so much the execution of that slow-mo scene. But he in that moment decides that he’s going to give up Jack to save his father, which I think is a really interesting thing, because he’d kind of been hating on his father all the while until now he’s faced with him almost dying. He’s like, well, I love my father anyway, so I’m going to save his life by giving up my charge.

The third attempt at escape is another close call. They are in a cart. Jack is dressed as a civilian. And the wheel of the cart breaks and that’s when the Germans approach to help them and they’re like, oh no. And then Schafter — the suspicious looking guy — helps them and you’re like, wait, is he going to give them away? But he doesn’t. You get the idea that he doesn’t know what’s going on. And as they’re getting on the ferry, Michiel bribes the ferryman, which also doesn’t happen in the book — in the book this ferryman is a very willing participant in helping people. But he has to bribe him in the movie. But as they get on, Jack is like, wait a second, something’s not right, and then from across the river they get shot upon by the Germans and they have to get away on Caesar. And it’s a very tense scene. And this is when Caesar dies. And we all cried.

Sam: (36:00)
No.

Maartje: (36:01)
And we all cried. It’s also terribly intense to watch because you see him break his leg and then they’re like, just in case you didn’t see it, here’s a bone sticking out of his leg. And there’s this moment where you think Michiel’s going to shoot the horse to put it out of its misery. And Jack ends up doing it instead because he’s a pilot and he knows how to use a gun. But it’s really sad and Michiel is really sad. They do manage to get away from the Germans and Michiel is like, well, we can’t go back to the hideout because they all know where it is by now. And he instead takes him home and that’s when they see Schafter — the suspicious looking man — in his garden as a little girl builds a snowman. And it’s a dark-haired little girl and it’s very subtle, but it’s implied that she’s a Jewish girl. So he’s not collaborating with the Germans, after all.

Sam: (36:55)
Yeah, and after the little girl goes inside, he stomps the snowman so that there’s no evidence that a child was ever there. And that’s when you’re like, that’s not his daughter. That’s someone he’s hiding in his house and he doesn’t want anyone to know she’s in there. And then the rest of his behaviour kind of makes sense because it’s like, yeah, if you’re hiding someone from the Nazis, then you want to give the outward appearance of getting along with them. And it’s not entirely dissimilar to what Michiel’s father was doing, right?

Maartje: (37:22)
No, it’s very similar. And I wonder if in that moment that even reminded him of his father a little bit. And in the book a lot of it happens around the town — in the woods and like further into the woods — and all the houses that he has to visit are far away. And Schafter is always near him, like he’s always following him around. But all of that in the book ends up being completely accidental and Michiel actually thinks it’s Schafter who gave away the location of the man that gets shot as he runs away. He thinks Schafter has done all these things. In the book he’s very much the antagonist as much as the Germans are. So in the movie it’s less obvious, I think.

Sam: (38:20)
Yeah. You definitely need a red herring sort of character, you know. Look over here at this guy so you don’t notice who the real bad guy is.

Maartje: (38:28)
Ha! I want to know who’s left — it should be the bad guy.

Sam: (38:32)
Yes. And I think it’s interesting that they changed the thing with the ferryman needing to be bribed in the movie because we’ve touched on this super briefly before, but it’s the whole thing about how in retrospect people love to think that everyone was involved in the resistance, but really it’s much less clear cut than that.

Maartje: (38:52)
It’s also another change from the book that Michiel is pretty much doing everything himself in the movie. In the book there’s a couple of people that he suspects are in the resistance that he goes to talk to — one of them being his school teacher, who’s not in the movie, I understand why they took him out. But he gets a lot more help in the book than he does in the movie. So he’s pretty isolated in the movie, which I understand as a choice, but the other stories are interesting too.

Sam: (39:24)
Yeah, maybe it just makes it a little more tense and thrillery if he’s doing it by himself. And I think it also feeds into this thing of — he starts out with the attitude that many kids have where you’re like, I would love the opportunity to be a hero and do something that the grown-ups can’t help me with and I’m going to do it all by myself. And then as he progresses through he finds out how difficult it really is to do that without any help and how lonely it is to take on that level of responsibility.

Maartje: (39:52)
For sure. In the book you also get the sense that he wants to do it by himself, but he realises much more quickly that he can’t. Also a funny thing about the book is that everybody seems to know who’s in the resistance. I’m like, hmm, would everybody know?

Sam: (40:10)
Right, exactly. That does feel kind of crazy because there were a lot of Dutch people who did collaborate with the Germans, even passively, and you’re like, well it probably wouldn’t be safe for everyone to know who’s in the resistance.

Maartje: (40:24)
No. And it’s far too easy for Michiel in the book to contact the school teacher, who’s a slightly older man in the resistance. Because even Dirk — in the book Dirk is like twenty-two. So not a child, but also not a very well-connected adult yet. And the school teacher — you kind of suspect him at some point in the book too. They’ve given you fewer choices in the movie of who you could be suspecting. There’s really only one and that’s Schafter, and then the second you know Schafter’s not it, you’re like, wait a second.

Sam: (41:02)
Yeah. And I wasn’t like, my god, what an enormous twist or anything like that. And the movie I also don’t think completely hinges on that big reveal. Like it’s interesting that it happens, but the rest of the movie is good without it being like, if you know that it’s going to spoil it for you kind of thing.

Maartje: (41:23)
Yeah. Michiel tells Uncle Ben about Jack because he’s kind of up against the wall — he’s got Jack in the shed. And Ben informs him that he’ll take over from here. He’s going to get Jack to Zwolle over the bridge on foot with Erika’s help. And they don’t need Michiel’s help anymore, so that’s quite disappointing for the young lad. And Ben tells Michiel that Dirk should never have put him in this position. He’s like, you’re a kid, Dirk should have never done this. And it’s relevant that he mentions Dirk, which we’ll find out in a moment.

Maartje: (42:01)
Indeed. He also catches Jack and his sister in bed together, which he’s incredibly mad and annoyed about.

Sam: (42:10)
Yes, he is furious. And I mean it’s predictable, of course. You’re like, ooh, there’s a pretty nurse and a handsome young pilot. What could possibly happen next?

Maartje: (42:20)
It doesn’t happen in the book. Like in the book they kiss in the hideout and that’s it. But then again the book really is like a kid’s book, so…

Sam: (42:29)
Yeah. Yeah, they didn’t want to be like, Michiel came upon Jack and his sister naked in their bedroom.

Maartje: (42:36)
Naked. After they’ve gone — they being Uncle Ben, Jack and Erika — Michiel realises that he never once mentioned Dirk to Uncle Ben. So you’re like, wait a second. So Michiel is pretty alarmed about this and he rifles through Ben’s suitcase, you know, the one with all the obvious “I work for the resistance” paperwork. And he finds it has a hidden bottom. And it’s full of similar German papers. So it’s like, alright, so he’s working for the Germans, I guess. And also he finds the letter that Jack had meant to send to his mother in England in his possession. So you know that’s how he found out that Michiel was hiding Jack somewhere. And we see a sort of collage of him overhearing Michiel speaking to his sister about Jack, and also overhearing another moment where he’s watching from the attic — which was set up earlier in the movie when Michiel actually spies on a young girl that he fancies that’s staying over at his house. And I didn’t realise that was a setup when I watched it. I thought this is kind of just a sixteen year old being aware of girls for the first time, and it had a purpose.

Sam: (44:05)
Chekhov’s hole in the floor.

Maartje: (44:07)
Yes, exactly. It doesn’t happen in the book again, so this is a movie plot thing that’s really helpful. So once Michiel realises what’s going on, he decides that he has a bike and he has to chase Ben and Jack and Erika. And he gets to them right as they get to the bridge and he pulls out Jack’s gun — Jack has a gun, we’ve not even talked about the gun, but Jack has a gun. And he pulls the gun out on Ben. He’s pretty adamant that Ben is a bad guy, and he is. And that’s when they kind of all tie him up to a tree. And Erika and Jack go over the bridge. Erika goes over the actual bridge. And Jack has to scale it like some kind of superhuman being somehow. I don’t know how that works. But yes.

Sam: (44:57)
Yeah. You have to have papers to cross the bridge because there are German soldiers up there, and Erika has papers, but obviously Jack doesn’t. So yeah, he’s kind of monkey-bar climbing his way across the underside of the bridge, and I’m like, wow, this guy’s pretty strong for a man who is essentially laid in a hole for a few weeks and has a leg wound.

Maartje: (45:16)
In the movie it’s a decent hole. But in the book it’s a hole that’s been dug by Dirk on the spot. So it’s like a two-metre hole with a bunch of leaves in it and that’s it. So they’ve kind of upgraded him to the suite in the movie.

Sam: (45:31)
I guess it looks a little better if he’s not just laying in a small hand-dug furrow. But I mean, thanks, Dirk. Someone had to dig the hole, I guess.

Michiel is keeping guard over Ben effectively while Jack makes his escape. And Ben tries to reason with Michiel, he tries to make a deal with him. He tells him that in the whole scenario where Michiel’s father was killed by firing squad — Ben actually arranged for Michiel’s father to go free and the Germans would take someone else instead. But Michiel’s father is such a good guy and such a stand-up pillar of the community that he was like, no, I’m not doing that. I’m not putting someone else’s life on the line here. So Michiel is watching, Jack makes it across, and he’s safe and everything is good. But when Michiel turns around, Uncle Ben has managed to get free and has run away. And Michiel catches up with him, he pulls the gun on him. There are Germans nearby moving through the woods, men and tanks and vehicles. And it seems like Michiel won’t shoot. So Ben smiles and turns to walk away, and that’s when Michiel shoots him in the back, which I think is absolutely wild because we had the scene not too long ago where he could not shoot his precious childhood horse, but he really had no trouble shooting Uncle Ben in cold blood.

Maartje: (46:50)
It’s a choice. It’s a really big change from the book because in the book the circumstances of Ben’s capture are entirely different. Like they don’t get to the IJssel bridge. They’re all still in the hideout. And I think they’re with other members of the resistance and Dirk at this point, so there are a couple more people. He sort of gets away and then there’s a Spitfire that’s firing on an ammunition truck or something and that truck explodes, and he’s just gone — there’s nothing left of him. So it’s not Michiel who has to make that choice, and he gets saved from having to make that moral decision. And they did put it in the movie and I wonder why.

Sam: (47:39)
Yeah, I think it puts the final — it’s kind of grim to say — nail in the coffin of his childhood, but by giving him the agency of making that choice, his transition to an adult is complete. He gets to make that decision for better or worse, and he gets to have the agency here.

Maartje: (47:57)
Yes. I don’t think it’s a bad choice, but it’s a little extreme in this movie.

Sam: (48:03)
For sure, especially because I know you said he’s fifteen or sixteen in the book, but the actor doesn’t look that old to me. Like I assumed he was like thirteen maybe. And to see this kid shoot his uncle, who yes, of course, did some bad things, but to see this kid just able to shoot a family member like that, I was like, whoa, okay, alright.

Maartje: (48:26)
There’s also this conversation they have before he gets away where he’s like, look, Michiel, what do you think is going to happen? Like, would you rather have the Germans or the Russians?

Sam: (48:38)
Yeah, because I mean the war’s almost over, right? This is like the winter of forty-four, forty-five. And I think the comment he makes is that the Russians are coming and then we’ll see who the real occupiers are, sort of implying that the communists would be worse than the fascists. And that’s really the only inkling we get of Uncle Ben’s motivations of why he’s doing what he’s doing.

Maartje: (48:58)
I think in the book that actually happens a lot earlier when we don’t really suspect him yet and it’s this earnest conversation they have about their occupiers. And it’s quite interesting actually to think about that when you don’t suspect him of being an evil guy yet. And in the book his father is kind of the moral compass, saying look, nobody is just evil, nobody is just good. He talks to Michiel about this before he dies. I’m kind of sad that didn’t make it into the movie — I would have liked to have seen that from the father. But in the book Ben also really pretends that he hates the Germans a lot. He is very nice to Michiel actually. And in the book he does really love him. He says look, I just tried to keep you safe and I would have kept you safe if you hadn’t done all this, you know?

Sam: (49:53)
Yeah, well, in the immortal words of Stephen Sondheim, nice is different than good.

Maartje: (49:58)
Yes, it definitely is. Anyway, and we’re very near the end of the movie here. The village is liberated, everyone is celebrating. Michiel is inside refusing to celebrate because he feels like there’s not much to celebrate about. And his dear sweet mother — I love this mother so much — she’s like, you have to go outside, you have to go and celebrate with your friends. And that’s when his friend Theo — who we haven’t seen in a while, but here he is again — he comes over and he’s like, do you want to play with my little rubber hose that I got from the plane for a second? And he spins it over his head and becomes a little kid again at the very end. And I did really like that ending.

Sam: (50:42)
Yeah. Me too. The all is not lost thing — that there can be innocence after all of that. The war is coming to its end at the same time as he is getting to sort of get over the death of his father and what the whole situation with Uncle Ben was, and he’s entering this new chapter of his life. I did enjoy that as well.

Maartje: (51:03)
Yeah, I kind of left out one scene that I want to quickly talk about. It’s a scene that’s not in the book where Michiel and his mother, as his father is taken, try to find out where he is, and they go to the city hall and they try to get him released. His mother makes a noise, makes a racket by crying for her husband. And Michiel runs into the same guy that we opened the movie with, the big chief. And the big chief is like, I don’t recall inviting you here, get lost. And it’s kind of this really sad scene in between, but it also shows you how resilient this mother is, and I really liked that they gave her a little bit more to do in the movie compared to the book. And also this actress is great. I love this actress so much.

Sam: (51:58)
Yeah. I liked her in the movie as well. She was obviously such a doting mum, and there is really something to be said about being this lady who is not quote unquote involved in politics, but she obviously raised two children who do the right thing when the options are presented to them. Her oldest becomes a nurse whose vocation is to take care of people. And she is holding down this household when her husband’s been killed and then this whole situation with Ben happens. And you know that she’s going to get them through this, and that also matters. Like that is also a sort of heroism, you know?

Maartje: (52:38)
For sure. So yeah, that’s the end of the movie. I have a couple of notes about the ending of the book. At the very end of the book, Michiel expresses that he wishes there won’t ever be a war like this again. And then immediately after, in the book we get an epilogue and it’s a forty-three year old Michiel in 1972, which is also when the first print of this book came out. He looks back on all the places that there’s been a war since. Like it’s not a narrative. He just lists all the places that there has been a war and there’s like forty countries or something. So that’s I think the author’s commentary on what’s going on in the world for sure.

Sam: (53:28)
Yeah. Maybe a little perhaps — I was going to say maybe a little oversimplified, but it is a children’s book, so we’ll allow it.

Maartje: (53:35)
Yeah. I don’t think it’s meant for the children though. I don’t think you get it as a child, what he’s trying to say. I think it’s just a reminder to people in general of being like, look, war’s never going to be over. We’re always going to have war because of how we are. I don’t know, it’s just really — it’s stripped of all storytelling. It’s just a list of countries where there has been a war, so it’s bleak. That’s the only extra notes I had actually about the ending of the book. I do like that the ending of the movie is sort of hopeful instead of the book where we’re like, okay, I guess we don’t get to enjoy liberation for two seconds, we just have to be reminded of all the wars that came since.

Sam: (54:22)
Yes. I think too in the last scene of the movie when you see everybody celebrating, the sister gets a letter and to me it felt like it was implied that it was a letter from Jack potentially. So I liked that as well. You at least get the notion that he escaped to freedom.

Maartje: (54:41)
Yes, he did. In the book, they don’t escape over the bridge — the resistance gets him out. We don’t know how, but the book tells of him writing to them, not necessarily on Liberation Day, but just in general. It’s also implied that him and Michiel’s sister don’t stay together. He just goes back to England.

Sam: (55:01)
He ghosts her.

Maartje: (55:02)
He does write, to be fair. But you know. We have to rate this movie, but before we do, I would like to remind you that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and rate us five stars. Or you can send this episode to a friend.

Sam: (55:18)
Well, every time you send this episode to a friend, an RAF pilot gets his wings back by escaping to England.

Maartje: (55:25)
Aww, that’s a good one. So do send it to a friend. And also if you want to read this book that is very formative for a lot of Dutch people, it’s available in English. So do have a go and see what you think. Yeah. What are we going to rate it out of though?

Jack gives Michiel his dirty playing cards. Maybe we should rate it dirty playing cards out of ten.

Sam: (55:52)
Sure. How many dirty playing cards out of ten would you rate this movie?

Maartje: (55:55)
I think I would rate this movie eight and a half dirty playing cards out of ten. I really enjoyed it. And it made me love the story a bit more than the book did as an adult, so maybe that’s part of why it gets such a high rating. I really, really like the acting of most of the Dutch people. I didn’t like Jamie Campbell Bower’s acting too much — I thought it was a bit off somehow, especially in the beginning. Later on it gets better. But yeah, it’s a solid World War Two boys adventure movie and I enjoyed it for that. And it’s nice to see something that is fictional but that has happened in my neck of the woods. So yes, I enjoyed it. How about you?

Sam: (56:42)
Yeah, I think it’s probably difficult being the only quote unquote English language actor in a foreign film, maybe.

Maartje: (56:48)
Yes. Fair.

Sam: (56:49)
Yeah, I enjoyed this movie. I found myself really quickly hooked into the story. It wasn’t a difficult watch by any means. I found some of the characters really compelling. As I mentioned earlier, I thought the child actor did a great job. There were some scenes in particular where I was like, damn, this kid is really selling it. He’s doing a great job. I think the beautiful stark winter scenery is used really well. Visually I have a lot of moments from the movie that kind of stick in my mind. As I said before, there are some parts of the plot that I found maybe a little bit too contrived or simplistic, but broadly speaking, pretty good movie. I’m going to give it seven and a half dirty playing cards out of ten.

Maartje: (57:33)
Perfect. Are you reading anything?

Sam: (57:35)
I am — I want to tell you about this book that I recently finished. It’s called Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine by Patrick Scanlon. It was recommended to me by Friend of the Pod, SAS correspondent George, and it’s a pretty short little book — I want to say about 250-ish pages, which is, for a history book, for historical nonfiction, that’s short. But wow, if you want to read a book that makes you absolutely furious about the British Empire, this is the one you should read.

Maartje: (58:07)
Interesting that it’s also about a famine, by the way. Lots of famine today.

Sam: (58:12)
Yes.

Maartje: (58:13)
Are you reading anything right now?

Sam: (58:14)
I’m reading the Vietnam book right now that I talked about last time, still neck deep in that one.

Maartje: (58:20)
Okay. I just finished a little book and it’s literally a tiny tiny book. It’s a novella called Reunion by Fred Uhlman and it’s fantastic. It’s like the most beautiful short story I’ve ever read. So if you’ve not read it, please do read it. It’s beautiful. And it’s got the most satisfying final line of a book ever. It’s also sad, but like the final line is so good.

Sam: (58:47)
I’m excited to check it out.

Maartje: (58:48)
Yeah, it’s available on the Internet Archive if you don’t feel like buying it. So it’s easy. I did buy it though — I’m happy to support this author who’s no longer alive, so I don’t know who I’m supporting.

Sam: (59:02)
Supporting their estate, you know.

Maartje: (59:04)
Sure. And I’m reading Memories of Anne Frank at the moment, which is really funny because I’m reading it in Dutch because I thought I want to read it in a language that it was originally written in. Turns out it’s originally written in English. So I’m reading a translation of a book about someone who lived in the Netherlands.

Sam: (59:23)
Interesting.

Maartje: (59:30)
I’m also reading The Correspondent. I must have talked about it already because I was reading it a couple of weeks ago and I stopped, but I’m still reading that. And I’m reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is really funny and very different from any of the other books. So yeah, lots of reading. I’ve read like ten books in the past four weeks, so I’m pretty happy.

Sam: (59:53)
I should say that I’ve also started Dungeon Crawler Carl because you told me about it and then I went on a camping trip with my brother and my cousin and my cousin was like, I’m reading this new book series, it’s so good, and it turns out that it was Dungeon Crawler Carl. So he put on the audiobook in the car for me and we listened to the first like three chapters, I think. So he is going to lend me his hard copy. I just haven’t picked it up yet. But yeah, I have made a start on that.

Maartje: (1:00:16)
Ooh. Well, book two is better, so I hope you’ll like it enough to keep going.

Sam: (1:00:21)
Okay.

Maartje: (1:00:21)
Okay, well next time I want to hear about your trip, but this episode is long enough, so I’m going to thank our audience for listening to yet another episode of Rosie. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast, or you can visit our website, rosiethereviewer.com, to rate this movie with us. And we’ll see you next week.

Sam: (1:00:44)
See you then.

Maartje: (1:00:45)
Bye!