NOW STREAMING — the story that will haunt you long after the screen goes dark.

You think you’ve seen every Holocaust story. You think you’re prepared. Then My Name Is Sara begins, and within the first ten minutes, your illusions shatter like glass under a boot. This is not a museum piece or a history lesson. This is a 13-year-old girl watching her entire world die in a ditch, then learning to smile while burying the scream inside her chest. Netflix didn’t just acquire a film—they unleashed a reckoning.

Directed by Steven Oritt in his staggering feature debut, My Name Is Sara is based on the verified testimony of Sara Shapiro (née Góralnik), a Ukrainian Jewish child who survived the Nazi occupation by becoming someone else entirely. The year is 1942. The place: Korolówka, a speck on the map soon to be erased by blood. The opening sequence is merciless in its simplicity. No swelling strings. No slow-motion tears. Just the crack of rifles and the thud of bodies hitting earth. Sara, separated from her family by a cruel twist of fate, hides in the tall grass and watches her mother, father, two brothers, and baby sister vanish into a mass grave. The camera lingers on her face—Zuzanna Surowy, in a performance so raw it feels invasive—and you realize: this is the last moment she will ever be Sara Góralnik.

From that point forward, the film becomes a masterclass in sustained dread. Sara reinvents herself as “Sara Kulka,” a Ukrainian Christian orphan with forged papers and a fabricated past. She is taken in by the Patura family, farmers who need an extra pair of hands and suspect nothing. Or do they? Every frame hums with the possibility of discovery. A neighbor’s lingering stare. A priest’s probing question about baptism. The way Ivan Patura (Eryk Lubos) counts the silverware after Sara clears the table. The tension is surgical—Oritt wields silence like a blade.

Critics have run out of adjectives. The New York Times calls it “unshakable.” IndieWire labels it “gut-wrenching.” The Guardian goes further: “The most powerful story Netflix has released in years.” And they’re not wrong. This isn’t Schindler’s List grandeur or The Pianist’s urban claustrophobia. This is rural terror, where the enemy isn’t just the SS officer—it’s the milkmaid who knew your mother, the boy who once shared apples with you, the dog that barks when you whisper Hebrew in your sleep.

Let’s talk about that whisper. One of the film’s most devastating scenes occurs six months into Sara’s new life. Alone in the barn, she recites the Shema under her breath—the central prayer of Judaism. The camera pushes in so close you can see the tears balancing on her lower lashes. She stops mid-sentence, terrified she’s been overheard. The silence that follows is louder than any explosion. In that moment, you understand: survival isn’t just about staying alive. It’s about murdering pieces of yourself every single day.

The Real Sara: From Testimony to Screen

Sara Shapiro’s story might have remained locked in the USC Shoah Foundation archives had Steven Oritt not stumbled upon her 1996 interview. In it, the elderly woman—by then a New Jersey grandmother—speaks with unnerving calm about the day she became a ghost. “I stopped being Sara Góralnik the moment the shooting started,” she says. “I became whoever they needed me to be.” Oritt spent three years adapting her words, consulting historians, and filming in the actual Ukrainian fields where the massacres occurred. The result is a film that feels less like drama and more like contraband smuggled out of hell.

Historical context matters here, because My Name Is Sara refuses to let you look away from the specifics. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators murdered approximately 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine alone. Korolówka’s slaughter, while dramatized, mirrors documented atrocities in nearby Kamianets-Podilskyi, where 23,600 Jews were killed in three days. The film doesn’t dwell on statistics, but it weaponizes them: every time Sara kneads dough beside Mrs. Patura, you remember that 90% of Ukraine’s Jewish children never saw 1945.

A Child’s War: The Psychology of Erasure

What does it do to a 13-year-old brain to erase its own history? Clinical psychologists who’ve screened the film describe Sara’s journey as a case study in dissociative survival. She creates an internal partition: Real Sara lives in a locked room at the back of her mind, visited only in dreams. False Sara learns to curtsy, to cross herself, to laugh at jokes about “dirty Jews.” The cost is catastrophic. Nightmares. Trichotillomania. A stutter that vanishes only when she’s lying.

Zuzanna Surowy, herself Polish and just 14 during filming, prepared by living on the Patura farm for two weeks. She milked cows at 4 a.m., scrubbed floors with lye, and spoke only Ukrainian. “I wanted to know what it felt like to be useful but invisible,” she told Variety. The authenticity bleeds through every frame. When Sara burns her forearm on a stove and doesn’t flinch—because pain is safer than attention—you believe she’s been hollowed out and refilled with vigilance.

The Paturas: Saints, Sinners, or Something In Between?

No review of My Name Is Sara is complete without dissecting the family that shelters her. Ivan and Maria Patura are not the noble saviors of The Zookeeper’s Wife. They are farmers with mouths to feed and a war to survive. Ivan drinks. Maria prays. Their teenage son flirts with Sara in the barn, unaware that a single kiss could sign her death warrant. The film’s genius lies in its refusal to resolve their morality. When Maria teaches Sara to embroider a Catholic saint, is it kindness or control? When Ivan beats a suspected partisan in the yard, is he protecting Sara or proving his loyalty to the occupiers?

Eryk Lubos’s Ivan is a career-best performance—hulking, taciturn, capable of tenderness and terror in the same breath. Watch the scene where he discovers Sara’s hidden Star of David pendant. The camera holds on his face for twelve agonizing seconds. Does he pocket it to protect her? Or to use as leverage later? The ambiguity is exquisite.

Cinematic Craft: How to Film a Nightmare

Cinematographer Marek Wieser shoots on 35mm, giving the film a grainy immediacy that digital can’t replicate. Colors are leached—muddy greens, corpse grays, the occasional blood-red poppy like a wound in the landscape. Sound design is equally brutal: the distant rumble of trucks, the squeal of unoiled gates, the way Sara’s breathing syncs with the wind until you can’t tell them apart.

Bartosz Chajdecki’s score is notable for what it doesn’t do. No violins during the massacre. No crescendo when Sara escapes a close call. Instead, he uses a single detuned piano and the faint echo of a Yiddish lullaby that Sara’s mother used to sing. The melody appears three times—once in memory, once in nightmare, once as Sara hums it to a neighbor’s baby. Each iteration guts you differently.

Critical Acclaim and Cultural Impact

Early festival screenings triggered walkouts—not from gore, but from emotional overload. One viewer in Toronto reportedly sat frozen through the credits, whispering “I can’t unsee her face.” Netflix acquired the film after a bidding war, scheduling it for a quiet November drop. The strategy backfired in the best way: within 48 hours, #MyNameIsSara trended globally. TikTok is flooded with reaction videos—teens sobbing, historians fact-checking, rabbis analyzing the theology of hidden faith.

Educational outreach has been aggressive. Netflix partnered with Facing History and Ourselves to create a 30-minute curriculum. Over 5,000 U.S. schools have requested screenings. In Poland, where the film was partially shot, it’s sparked renewed debate about wartime collaboration. A far-right politician called it “anti-Ukrainian propaganda.” A survivor’s group countered by screening it in Warsaw’s POLIN Museum to a standing ovation.

The Ethics of True Stories

Any film this raw invites scrutiny. Did Oritt take liberties? Yes—Sara’s real family name was slightly altered for privacy, and the Paturas are composites. But every beat tracks with Shapiro’s testimony. The massacre scene, though fictionalized in choreography, matches survivor accounts of the Korolówka liquidation. The forged papers, the pork refusal, the near-betrayal by a childhood friend—all documented.

More controversial is the ending. Without spoiling, know this: Sara survives. But survival is not triumph. The final shot—a tracking sequence through postwar America—shows an elderly woman boarding a bus. She hesitates at the door, scanning faces as if still expecting recognition. The real Sara Shapiro lived until 2018, dying at 89. Her granddaughter told The Atlantic: “She never stopped checking the rearview mirror.”

Why This Film Matters in 2025

We are eight decades removed from the Holocaust, yet antisemitic incidents hit record highs last year—up 400% in some European cities. Gen Z consumes history through memes and Marvel. My Name Is Sara is the antidote: a story so intimate it bypasses statistics and lodges in your marrow. It’s the reason Netflix’s algorithm, for once, gets it right when it autoplays this after you binge Stranger Things.

Viewer Warnings and Catharsis

This is not a date-night movie. It’s a sit-alone-with-headphones, pause-to-breathe, text-your-mom-afterward experience. Common side effects: insomnia, spontaneous crying in grocery stores, the urge to learn your grandparents’ stories before it’s too late. One Reddit user wrote: “I paused at the 47-minute mark because I couldn’t see through tears. Finished it at 3 a.m. Haven’t slept since. 10/10.”

The Legacy

Sara Shapiro never wrote a memoir. She didn’t need to. Her life was the book, and Oritt merely transcribed the unreadable parts. As the last survivors pass, films like this become our final witnesses. They remind us that courage isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a 13-year-old girl swallowing her faith with every bite of non-kosher bread, praying the taste of betrayal doesn’t show on her face.

Netflix didn’t just drop a movie. They dropped a mirror. Look into it, and you’ll see Sara’s eyes staring back—wide, wary, impossibly alive. Childhood stolen. Family gone. Identity vanished. Courage unforgettable.

NOW STREAMING. Clear your schedule. Lock the door. And whatever you do, don’t blink. Because once you meet Sara, you’ll carry her with you forever.