An Austrian film explores the way a few Jews survived the Holocaust, writes Michael Dwyer

THERE have been so many hundreds of movies dealing with the second World War that it seemed like all the stories had been told by now. Not so, as The Counterfeitersrelates the experiences of Jewish men sent to concentration camps and forced to forge different currencies. The Nazis had a dual purpose: to fund their own war effort and to destabilise the British and American economies by flooding the market with fake pounds and dollars.

The central figure in the film is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a master forger of passports and currency. We know he survived because the film opens shortly after the war when he arrives at a hotel in Monte Carlo with a suitcase full of cash. An extended flashback begins in Berlin in 1936, as Sorowitsch relishes the decadent lifestyle of the era and funds his enjoyment by printing his own banknotes.

As a Jew, he is arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where one of the commandants is Heinrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), a former Berlin police inspector aware of Sorowitsch's talent for forgery. Herzog includes him when he assembles a group of prisoners chosen for their expertise as professional printers, graphic artists and typographers. Sorowitsch is appointed as supervisor of the "retouching" department.

As these men need to be fresh for their new roles as counterfeiters for the Third Reich, they are segregated from the other prisoners in the camp and given comfortable beds, decent food and better clothing in an area that becomes known as the Golden Cage. Unlike their fellow Jews, they are regarded by the Nazis as more valuable alive than dead, but warned that they are not indispensable.

The men are isolated from the horrific fate of the other prisoners, although they can hear their screams and the sound of gunfire, and they realise that the suits they have been given to wear still bear the identity cards of fellow Jews sent to the gas chambers.

The Counterfeitersaddresses the conflicts of principle that arise when this awareness prompts a crisis of conscience in some of the men, principally Sorowitsch's friend Adolf Burger (August Diehl), who questions the morality of faking money to finance the Nazis war machine. "One adapts or dies," Sorowitsch responds with characteristic pragmatism.

This clash of survival instincts and moral quandaries adds to the developing tension of the drama and keeps the reality of what is happening outside the Golden Cage in perspective. Scenes illustrating the casually indiscriminate taking of human lives are selectively featured, and prove all the more chilling as a result.

The Counterfeiters, which is Austria's national entry for best foreign film at next spring's Oscars, is based on The Devil's Workshop, written by Burger, now 90 now and living in Prague. The screenplay is by the movie's Austrian director, Stefan Ruzowitzky, best known here for his stylish horror-thriller Anatomy(2000), in which students at a medical school are exploited in illicit experiments.

Ruzowitzky artfully compresses Burger's memoirs into a taut, consistently absorbing film that tells a true story with precision and dramatic complexity. Markovics invests Sorowitsch with the alert, shifty look of a shady operator who prides himself as a perfectionist in his forgeries and firmly believes that crime really does pay, especially when it carries the highest reward: saving his own life, even if that achievement will haunt him forever.