The 2003 film “Out of the Ashes” for Showtime, directed by Joseph Sargent (DGC), is said to present “the real Sophie’s Choice”.
The heroine is Dr. Gisella Perl (Christine Lahti) who comes to New York right after WWII to practice medicine and deliver babies. But her citizenship must be approved, and the INS has a lot of questions about how she behaved in Auschwitz where the Nazis “let” her work as a doctor for them.
The film, like Sophie’s Choice, works in flashbacks, telling the story of her family upbringing, of her capture, movement through the ghetto to Auschwitz. Early on, as a little girl she says she wants to be a doctor, and her father says that being a mother and producing children for the family ought to be good enough for her. Her pride tends to continue throughout as a major element of the film. The Nazis present a variety of situations that could be taken as moral grayness, even given her wanting to live. She tries to save her brother, dying of pneumonia, before she realizes that the Red Cross appearance is a sham. It’s a while before she completely grasps what the camps are really all about. She is confronted with more existential issues about abortion and eugenics, particularly disturbing to her as an obstetrician.
The flashbacks are quite intense and brutal, just as they were in “Sophie’s Choice”. The Nazis act as if they were playing God, arbiters of who just might “deserve”, on utilitarian grounds, to keep going.
Beau Bridges, Richard Crenna, and Bruce Davison also appear.
Wikipedia attribution link for Auschwitz picture (near Cracow, Poland; I visited in May 1999).
The film bears no relation to “Angela’s Ashes”, about Irish immigrants.
YouTube mentions a documentary “Out of the Ashes” about an Afghan cricket team.
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