Films such as Judgment at Nuremberg have chronicled the crisis of conscience that afflicted ordinary Germans after World War II; Europa, Europa, however, examines that crisis as it was brewing, from the viewpoint of a man who embodied the nation's schisms in particularly dramatic fashion. Polish director Agnieszka Holland exhibits a lightness of touch that befits the film's fact-based premise. Solomon Perel's life was so extraordinary that it speaks for itself. In the establishing scenes of Perel's prewar youth, newcomer Marco Hofschneider embodies all the gawky charm of carefree boyhood. As the film charts his character's masquerade as first a good little Communist, then a brave Nazi war hero, it paints his struggles as merely the conflicted loyalties and unavoidable compromises of adolescence given terrible new significance by history. With few exceptions, wartime atrocities are depicted matter-of-factly, leaving the audience to make its own judgment about Perel and the dumb luck and quick thinking that allowed him to survive, even flourish. From André Wilms as the gay actor-turned-Nazi officer who nurtures young Perel to the superb Julie Delpy as the Aryan girl whose willfulness and pique are elevated to manifest destiny under Hitler's rule, the large international cast brings to life the varied personal stories that are sometimes missing from the history books.