During the Second World War, a young non-Jewish boy who doesn’t want his Jewish friend to leave unknowingly alters their lives forever in Toyland.
Germany
4*
Director:
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Screenwriters:
Johann A. Bunners
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Director of Photography:
Christoph “Cico” Nicolaisen
Running time: 14 minutes
Original title: Spielzeugland
From Life is Beautiful and Fateless to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Painted Bird, stories of children caught up in the chaos and brutality of the Holocaust are nothing new. The horrors are often a turning point that inevitably marks the end of their innocent, protected childhood. But what happens less often is that the children’s loss of safety is that there is an explicit (and inextricable) link to the adults’ loss of control. Life is Beautiful hinted at this, and Sophie’s Choice centred on it. But Jochen Alexander Freydank’s innocently titled short film, Toyland, presents it with devastating clarity.
In a German city during the Second World War, the Meißners (Meissners) and the Silbersteins are next-door neighbours in their apartment block. Both families have boys who are the same age, play piano together and are the best of friends. Despite the war, it appears the two boys are unaware that one of them is Jewish. One evening, when Mrs Marianne Meißner and her son, Heinrich, are at the Silbersteins’, the boys’ duet on the piano is interrupted by someone else in the building screaming at the “the Jews” to keep it down. It is only a matter of time before the Gestapo hauls them off to the concentration camps.
Marianne has been trying to prepare Heinrich for the inevitable departure of his friend, David, and his family. She tells him that David is going on a trip to the “toyland” but that he can’t go with them. This place sounds like so much fun that Heinrich barks back at her that his father would have allowed him to go with the Silbersteins. But Marianne sticks to her story, even as she knows that her son will have his heart broken either way.
What follows, amid the period’s historic barbarity, is an extraordinarily touching demonstration of humanity that involves every single one of the five characters. The twist ending will grab at many a viewer’s heart, although the more sceptical amongst us will question the likelihood of such a drama being resolved so seamlessly.
Set in the deep of winter, the ominous greys everywhere shy away from the pageantry of the Nazis’ trademark crimson. It is a desperate, unforgiving landscape, and because Jews are not inherently distinct from other Germans, everyone can be a suspect. At one point, Marianne is mistaken for a Jew, and at another, David Silberstein is presumed to be Aryan. These mistakes remind us of the nonsense of the Nazis’ ideology of Aryan identity, but Toyland does not belabour the point.
The acting from the main boy, Heinrich, is not the best, and Toyland’s final scene has an unfortunate Titanic quality to it, but the rest of the production is excellent.