“I was very naughty and powerful and stupid,” says Jutta Cords, remembering her attitude as a teenager. She was typical, but she was also living under extraordinary circumstances. As a high school student in Hitler's Germany, Jutta was surprised to learn from her parents that her maternal grandparents had converted from Judaism to Christianity before she was born. This meant that Jutta would be considered a “half-Jew,” and so could not marry or go to university. She remembers, “It made me very angry, because everything had been made impossible to me.”

“Jutta recalls as well her husband's work in the resistance, which the documentary renders through reenactments and a 1955 German film, Der 20 Juli. The essential plot of this drama, a 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, will be familiar to viewers of Valkyrie, Bryan Singer's 2008 film starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.”

“While she's in Berlin, Helmuth writes her from the Russian Front (“You won't believe it, I am still alive: the last two months were

absolute shit”) and then from a hospital. When he learns the Germans are running death camps for Jews (as opposed to concentration camps for political dissidents), Helmuth takes action, joining with his friend Werner and also von Stauffenberg. The film includes Helmuth's “actual voice” in a recording, as he poses the plotters' dilemma: “One of the hardest decisions that [Werner] had to make was, can one kill on purpose?”

“Surviving Hitler is most obviously “a love story” in its focus on Helmuth and Jutta's relationship, their correspondence over years and their efforts to be together. But it is another sort of story in its examination of the young couple's changing expectations, of themselves and also of the world around them. In this story, too, they are extraordinarily committed.”