In the dim flicker of your living room screen, where the glow of Netflix’s red “N” casts long shadows across the walls, a new kind of terror has arrived. It’s not the jump-scare variety, the kind that makes you yelp and spill your popcorn. No, this is slower, deeper – a creeping dread that seeps into your bones, the sort that lingers long after the credits roll, whispering questions into the quiet hours of the night. “My Name Is Sara,” Netflix’s latest WWII survival drama, dropped yesterday to an immediate frenzy of 15 million global streams in its first 24 hours. Based on the harrowing true story of Sara GĂłralnik, a 13-year-old Jewish girl from Ukraine whose family was slaughtered in a midnight raid, the film doesn’t just recount history. It resurrects it, forcing you to live it – breath held, pulse racing, empathy stretched to its breaking point.
Imagine this: It’s 1942, and the air in the Ukrainian village of Horyn hangs heavy with the stench of fear-sweat and burning thatch. Sara, with her wide hazel eyes and braids like twisted ropes of hope, huddles in a barn loft as Nazi boots thunder below. Her father, a farmer whose calloused hands once coaxed wheat from stubborn soil, presses a forged identity card into her trembling palm. “You are now Maria Petrenko,” he whispers, his voice a fragile thread in the tapestry of terror. “A Ukrainian Catholic orphan. Forget us. Forget everything. Live.” Hours later, the door splinters open. Gunfire cracks like God’s own wrath. Sara’s mother screams once – a sound that Sara will carry like a shard of glass in her throat for the rest of her life – before silence swallows the room. Her little brother, only seven, is dragged away by his heels, his tiny cries fading into the night. Sara escapes through a hay chute, emerging into a world where her name, her face, her very soul must be erased to survive.
“My Name Is Sara” isn’t content with mere recitation of these horrors. Directed by Steven Oritt – whose 2019 documentary “Sara’s Story” first brought her testimony to light – the film plunges you headfirst into Sara’s fractured psyche. Starring Polish actress Zuzanna Surowy as young Sara (in a debut performance that’s already generating Oscar buzz), the movie unfolds in a mosaic of stolen glances, hushed betrayals, and impossible choices. Surowy, just 16 during filming, channels a raw vulnerability that feels less like acting and more like possession. “I didn’t prepare by reading books,” she told Variety in a tear-streaked interview at the Toronto Film Festival premiere last month. “I listened to Sara’s tapes – the ones she recorded in the 1990s, frail voice recounting the unimaginable. Every night on set, I’d whisper her prayers to myself. It broke me open.”
The film’s opening sequence sets the tone with merciless precision. We see the GĂłralniks through Sara’s eyes: a family clinging to normalcy amid the village’s encroaching darkness. Father Moishe mends a neighbor’s harness by lamplight, humming a Yiddish lullaby. Mother Chaya braids Sara’s hair, slipping in stories of pre-war summers in the Carpathians, where wildflowers bloomed like forgotten dreams. Little Yankel, with his gap-toothed grin, chases shadows on the wall, pretending they’re friendly ghosts. It’s a portrait of love so tender it aches, because you know – as Sara knows, in her child’s intuition – that the shadows are coming for real.
When the raid hits, it’s not glorified violence; it’s chaos distilled to its essence. The camera doesn’t linger on gore – Oritt’s restraint is his genius – but on the human cost: a father’s futile lunge at a soldier’s rifle, a mother’s final, fierce hug that leaves bloodstains on Sara’s dress like accusing fingerprints. Sara, frozen in the corner, bites her tongue until it bleeds to stifle a scream. She slips out a loose floorboard, into the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the barn, her only possessions a locket with her family’s photo and that forged ID. Emerging in the Ukrainian countryside, she must become Maria: a street urchin with a limp (to explain her gauntness), a stutter (to mask her Yiddish inflections), and a backstory of parental loss in the bombings. “The hardest part,” Sara later recounted in her 2001 memoir My Name Was Sara, “wasn’t the hunger or the cold. It was killing Sara every morning in the mirror.”
What follows is an odyssey of survival that tests the limits of human endurance – and the darkness lurking in the hearts of “ordinary” people. Posing as a farmhand for a Ukrainian family named the Petrenkos – collaborators with the occupying forces – Sara/Maria milks cows by day and eavesdrops on atrocities by night. The patriarch, Ivan Petrenko (played with chilling banality by Ukrainian veteran actor Bohdan Stupka in his final role), isn’t a cartoonish villain; he’s the everyman of evil, quoting Ukrainian poets over dinner while signing off on deportation lists. His wife, Olena (a nuanced turn by Polish star Maja Ostaszewska), suspects something “off” about the girl – a flicker of defiance in her eyes, perhaps – and begins a subtle game of cat-and-mouse. One scene, set during an Orthodox Easter feast, will leave you breathless: As villagers sing hymns outside, Olena forces Maria to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Sara stumbles over the words, her mind flashing to Passover seders snuffed out forever. The room thickens with unspoken accusation; Olena’s hand hovers near a kitchen knife, her smile a blade.
Betrayal strikes like lightning. Sara finds an unlikely ally in Pavlo, a teenage Ukrainian resistance fighter (TimothĂ©e Chalamet lookalike newcomer Mykola Veres), who smuggles bread and whispers of uprisings. Their bond blossoms in stolen moments – a shared potato in a bombed-out church, a forbidden dance under moonlight – offering flickers of hope amid the gray. But trust is a luxury war can’t afford. When Pavlo is captured and tortured, he cracks under the Gestapo’s thumbscrews, naming Sara as a “Jew spy.” The revelation shatters her: not just the physical peril, but the soul-crushing realization that love, too, can be weaponized. Fleeing the village, Sara joins a ragtag group of child survivors hiding in the Carpathian forests, where winter bites deeper than any bullet. Here, the film delves into the psychological abyss – hallucinations of her family’s ghosts, moral quandaries over stealing from farmers, and the gnawing fear that survival might cost her humanity.
Oritt’s direction is a masterclass in sensory immersion. The sound design alone – courtesy of Oscar-winner Resul Pookutty – is a character unto itself: the distant wail of train whistles carrying souls to Treblinka, the wet smack of boots in mud-churned fields, the ragged rasp of Sara’s breath in tight crawlspaces. Cinematographer Michal Sobocinski employs a handheld intimacy that makes you feel like an intruder in Sara’s nightmares, his desaturated palette turning Ukraine into a watercolor of ash and regret. And the score? A haunting blend of klezmer laments reimagined for strings and solo bandura, composed by DakhaBrakha’s Marko Halanevych, whose motif underscores the film’s emotional core.
But “My Name Is Sara” transcends technical wizardry; it’s a gut-punch to the soul, a reminder that history’s greatest horrors weren’t perpetrated by monsters alone, but by men and women who looked the other way. Critics are already in rapture. The Hollywood Reporter’s Sheri Linden calls it “Netflix’s most unflinching Holocaust portrait since ‘The Pianist’ – intimate, devastating, and urgently necessary.” Variety’s Jessica Kiang dubs it “a survival tale that doesn’t just inform; it indicts, forcing us to confront the complicity in our own backyards.” On Rotten Tomatoes, it sits at a pristine 97%, with audiences weeping in theaters during its limited festival run. “I haven’t stopped shaking,” one viewer posted on X. “Sara’s story isn’t just survival – it’s a scream against forgetting.”
To grasp the film’s power, you must know Sara’s real story – a testament to resilience that outshines any script. Born Sara GĂłralnik in 1929 to a modest Jewish family in western Ukraine, she was indeed 13 when the 1942 massacre in her village claimed her parents and brother. The raid, part of the broader “Final Solution” in occupied Ukraine, saw entire Jewish communities liquidated overnight. Sara’s escape was no Hollywood contrivance; she did crawl through drainage ditches, guided by a neighbor’s whispered map, emerging coated in filth but alive. Adopting the identity of “Maria Petrenko,” she posed as a Catholic orphan, working odd jobs from farmhand to factory sweeper, always one wrong glance from exposure.
Her life as Maria was a tightrope over hell. In one documented betrayal – faithfully recreated in the film – she was sheltered by a sympathetic Ukrainian family, only for the son to denounce her for a sack of flour’s reward. Gestapo interrogations followed: blindfolds, icy buckets of water, promises of reunion with “lost loved ones” if she’d confess. Sara held fast, reciting fabricated tales of a dead mother and drunkard father until her voice gave out. She joined the resistance peripherally, ferrying messages in her braids, but her true heroism lay in quiet endurance. “I didn’t fight with guns,” she told the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996. “My weapon was forgetting – and remembering just enough to keep going.”
Post-liberation in 1945, Sara – now 16, weighing 68 pounds – returned to her village’s ruins, only to find her home a charred shell. No relatives survived; she was utterly alone. Emigrating to the United States in 1947 via displaced persons camps, she rebuilt: married a Holocaust survivor, bore two daughters, became a seamstress in Chicago. Yet the scars never faded. Nightmares of the raid plagued her; she could only eat bread if it was toasted, a trigger for the forbidden matzah shared with Pavlo in the film (based on a real, unnamed partisan). In the 1990s, as Holocaust denial gained traction, Sara broke her silence, testifying for the Shoah Foundation. “I survived,” she told Steven Spielberg in a 1997 interview, her eyes steel behind bifocals, “not for pity, but to bear witness. Let the world see what hatred births, so it never suckles again.”
Sara passed in 2018 at 89, her funeral in Chicago drawing survivors from across North America. Her daughter, Ruth Shapiro, executive-produced “My Name Is Sara,” infusing it with artifacts: Sara’s locket, now worn by Surowy; yellowed letters smuggled from the village; even the prayer shawl Sara’s father gave her, restrung for the soundtrack. “Mom never wanted a movie,” Ruth confessed at the premiere, voice thick with legacy. “She said stories like hers should be told in classrooms, not cinemas. But with antisemitism rising – synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh, vandalism in Paris – we can’t whisper anymore. This is her voice, amplified.”
The film’s timeliness is no accident. Released amid global unrest – from Ukraine’s echoes of occupation to debates over Holocaust education in U.S. schools – “My Name Is Sara” arrives as a clarion call. Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, announced it as “our most personal original drama,” backed by a $38 million budget that poured into authentic locations: recreated sets in Kyiv’s Film.UA Studios, on-location shoots in western Ukraine despite logistical nightmares from weather and regulations. Casting was exhaustive; Surowy beat out 4,000 girls after a viral audition tape of her singing a Yiddish folk song in her family’s attic.
Viewers are already transformed. Social media buzzes with #MyNameIsSara challenges: users sharing family heirlooms, recounting lost histories, pledging to visit Babyn Yar. A TikTok thread by teen influencer @HolocaustHistory amassed 18 million views, dissecting the film’s ditch escape with CGI recreations. Educators report classroom screenings sparking debates on identity and resilience; one Chicago high school teacher emailed Netflix: “My students, mostly immigrants’ kids, saw themselves in Sara. They wrote essays on ‘What name would I erase?’ It’s the most engaged they’ve been all year.”
Yet “My Name Is Sara” isn’t without controversy. Some critics, like The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, argue it risks “trauma porn,” aestheticizing suffering for streaming metrics. “Does beauty serve the story, or sell the pain?” he pondered. Defenders counter that Oritt’s touch is reverent, not exploitative – every tear earned, every shadow purposeful. Ruth Shapiro responds bluntly: “My mother survived hell to tell her truth. If it makes one person uncomfortable enough to act, we’ve honored her.”
As the film hurtles toward its climax – Sara, cornered in a forest blizzard, facing her betrayer in a knife-edge confrontation that blends fact and dramatic license – you’re left gasping, not from plot twists, but from the weight of what one girl endured. The final shot lingers on Surowy’s face, aged subtly to Sara’s elder years, gazing at a blooming Carpathian wildflower. No voiceover, no moral. Just the quiet bloom of survival.
“My Name Is Sara” isn’t escapism; it’s confrontation. It dares you to remember Sara – not as a statistic in a history book, but as a girl who traded her name for breath, her family for freedom, and emerged with a story that demands to be carried forward. Once you watch, her name – Sara GĂłralnik – etches itself into your memory, a defiant tattoo against oblivion. In a world quick to forget, this film ensures she endures. Stream it tonight. But keep the lights on. Some shadows never fully lift.
