Children of the Holocaust - but Nazi children

It would be easy to dismiss the Australian-German 2012 film Lore Homeward Bound with a group of Nazi children instead of the dogs and cat. And actually for half the movie that's about it - that's in fact the very challenge of the movie, trying to get us to sympathize with and care about these children, largely blameless despite the sins of their parents, as they make their way across Germany at and just after the end of the war, knowing very little about the current status of anything - hearing vague rumors about Americans controlling certain sections, Russians - much more dangerous - others, trying to get to the house of their Omi (grandma) where they believe they will be safely sheltered. (Dad, a high-ranking Nazi soldier, has fled, and mom, a totally nasty character in the few early scenes of the movie, leaves the children to be with her husband, leaving the oldest, the eponymous Lore - it's a proper noun, not a reference to folk lore - with some money, some valuables, and vague instructions on how to get to Omi - useless, in that the trains apparently have stopped running.) Lore owes a big debt to the great Japanese postwar film, The Human Condition, and there are of course many other movies of people crossing a dangerous landscape in search of shelter and security - and in the best, the journey is not just one from place to place but a journey from innocence to experience. About half-way through Lore this mode comes into play, as Lore begins to learn about the horrors her country - and in particular her father - perpetrated. Fortunately, does not wallow in self-righteousness and does not make Lore heroic or bold - she just gradually puts the pieces together, and we can watch as her world view changes very slowly, like shifting sand under her feet. She's still in some ways infected by the Nazi ideology that her parents spewed, but she starts to see around the edges and develop a consciousness. At the end, she strikes out with one symbolic but defiant action. It's a somewhat slow and somber film, but it does have some startling moments of high drama, and it truly follows the arc of a story - a film, like so many foreign, indie, or low-budget films, that flies completely below the radar and no doubt deserves a wider audience than it will ever have. Based on novel by Rachel Seifert, who deserves a lot of credit - she's an English or maybe American novelist, I think, and has taken on a very challenging task in bringing some sympathy and humanity to these children whose parents were pretty much monsters.