Ein Dorf schweigt (2009)

The film is set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Fleeing from Silesia, Johanna Dawe arrives in a Hessian village in the back of a truck with her two children and Heinz, an orphaned teenager she wants to protect. As war refugees, they are unwelcome there. Passersby call them “potato beetles” and chant, “Get out!” while local children pelt the newcomers with stones. When the stone-throwers are chased away, they flee across a field. One child steps on a mine and is killed along with two other children. The villagers accept Johanna and her family only reluctantly. She is supposed to stay with her children in the rectory, but the pastor refuses to take the four of them in. The mayor then arranges for them to stay at the home of his sister, Gisela: her fifteen-year-old son was killed in the mine explosion and his father is missing, so the mayor assumes there must now be room in her house for the refugee family. Gisela takes them in unwillingly. In time, she notices that Johanna does everything she can to cause her as little trouble as possible. And when it becomes clear that the refugees have not brought lice into her house, as Gisela initially suspected, Johanna is even allowed to help out at the hair salon she has set up in the house, earning a little extra money. The children and Heinz repeatedly get Johanna into trouble—for example, when someone borrows the scissors without asking, or when the children eat the cake meant for the funeral reception. On the day the children killed in the mine explosion are buried, the mourners notice that the pastor leaves out the final blessing for Gisela’s son. A murmur passes through the crowd, and the guests are puzzled. At the same time, Paul Hofmann returns from the war and arrives at the funeral. He sees his wife standing by the open grave, crying. Realizing that their son must have died, he collapses with grief. When he comes to, he understands that the shock of his son’s death, together with the terrible experiences he endured in the war, has changed him into a different person. Everything in the village feels unfamiliar to him. When he and his wife go to bed, he accuses her of having believed in Hitler’s victory until the very end, then tries to rape her. As the story continues, it becomes clear that Paul gets along better with Johanna, who fled from Silesia, than with his wife. Johanna uses grain the children have gathered from the surrounding fields to make delicious noodles. She brought the recipe from her Silesian home; this way of making them is unknown in the Hessian region. Soon, the first villagers take an interest in the tasty noodles, and even the American occupation forces show an interest. This gives Johanna the idea of selling them. At the black market where she plans to sell her noodles, the military police arrest Heinz on suspicion that he stole the noodles—or the grain used to make them. Heinz is subsequently released because he is below the age of criminal responsibility. Johanna suspects that Gisela was the one who tried to inform on Heinz to the military police, so she decides to move out and try staying with the pastor after all. He agrees this time, but the open hostility between the mayor and the pastor, as well as between various people in the village, becomes plain to see. Once at the rectory, Johanna makes herself useful and thoroughly cleans the place. While doing so, she comes across a room that has apparently been unoccupied for some time. The pastor forbids her to enter it. He explains that it belonged to his son Martin, who deserted the Volkssturm and was shot three days before the Americans arrived after someone betrayed his hiding place. Johanna promises, out of respect, never to enter the room again, but the pastor changes his mind and tells her to use his son’s belongings if she needs them. Later, Johanna often goes to a nearby forest, where she repeatedly encounters a teenager hiding there. It turns out to be Walter, Paul and Gisela’s fifteen-year-old son, whom everyone thought dead. He has been hiding from the occupying forces there ever since the Americans arrived. Johanna brings him food, as well as a jacket belonging to the pastor’s executed son. Only afterward does the pastor tell her that Walter was the one who denounced his son. The next day, she goes to Walter to reclaim the jacket. His mother, Gisela, shows up there, followed by her husband, who takes his supposedly dead son into his arms. Walter then goes to the church and asks the pastor for forgiveness, but the pastor refuses, saying, “I can’t.” The film ends with Johanna deciding to leave the village with her children and Heinz, the orphaned teenager, and move to Frankfurt am Main.