Betrayed review – restrained depiction of Norway’s Holocaust victims

This account of the internment of a Jewish boxer from Oslo packs an emotional punch, but pulls back from displaying any real horrors

Steven Spielberg once said of Schindler's List that he was telling a story of the Holocaust, not the story. There are millions of stories of the Shoah. Six million of them we'll never hear." In this heartfelt, restrained movie, Norwegian film-maker Eirik Svensson dramatises the true story of one family of victims from Nazi-occupied Norway. In November 1942, large numbers of Norwegian Jews were rounded up in the middle of the night and taken to a dock in Oslo; 529 were loaded on to a German cargo ship, the SS Donau, and deported to Auschwitz.

Jakob Oftebro plays Charles Braude, a good-natured and thoroughly decent young boxing champion who lives in Oslo with his parents and grown-up siblings, all six of them crammed into a two-bedroom apartment. The film begins at the very start of the war, taking great care to paint the Braudes as a close-knit, happy family; it is a little idealised perhaps, but knowing what is to come, incredibly emotional.