Ei koskaan yksin (2024)

During the Nazi era, many Jews flee Hitler’s tyranny and seek refuge in other countries. Some find themselves in Finland, hoping for a fresh start. Despite Finland’s alliance with Nazi Germany, the country’s Jewish citizens are protected by their government. When Germany demands the handover of Finnish Jews in the summer of 1942, Prime Minister Johan Wilhelm Rangell points to their Finnish citizenship. Some Finnish officials, however, would be only too happy to comply with the Gestapo’s demand to expel all the refugees. Abraham Stiller, a businessman, philanthropist, and respected member of Helsinki’s Jewish community, works to protect Jewish asylum seekers in Finland. To prevent them from being deported to Germany, he secures residence permits for them by employing them in his textile business, which he runs with his non-Jewish wife, Vera. When the refugees are forcibly taken to labor camps near German forces in northern Finland, the situation escalates. Stiller asks the new chief of the State Police, Arno Anthoni, for help. However, he has already made himself unpopular with Anthoni by throwing him out of his shop because of his openly antisemitic views. In an effort to curry favor with the Nazi authorities, Anthoni first deports some of the Jewish refugees staying with Stiller to a labor camp in Lapland. They include the doctor Georg Kollmann, whose wife and young son Stiller now feels especially responsible for. Despite open threats, Stiller stands by his people and even visits them in Lapland so they can celebrate Shabbat together. When Anthoni uses a trick to circumvent the Finnish government and deport eight of the prisoners, including Kollmann and his family, who now go voluntarily, Stiller is unable to stop him. He later exposes Anthoni’s machinations, however, thereby preventing any further handover of Finnish Jews to Germany. The framing story is an interview in which, thirty years later, a journalist asks the elderly Stiller about the events and learns that he feels guilty about the deportation of the eight people. She tracks down Georg Kollmann, the sole survivor, who works as a doctor at a clinic in Israel. He wants to leave the past behind, but has his full forgiveness symbolically conveyed to Stiller.