In the dim flicker of a candlelit farmhouse, where the creak of floorboards could spell doom and every whispered prayer is a gamble with fate, Netflix has unearthed a gem of raw, unflinching humanity: My Name Is Sara. Dropped onto the platform in a quiet October 2025 rollout amid a sea of blockbuster sequels and glossy true-crime docs, this biographical drama has swiftly clawed its way to the top of viewing charts, amassing over 28 million hours watched in its first week alone. Drawn from the harrowing real-life odyssey of Sara Góralnik—a 13-year-old Polish Jew who outwitted the Nazi machine by stealing a dead girl’s identity and embedding herself in the heart of enemy territory—the film is less a period piece than a visceral gut-punch to the soul. “Gripping. Honest. Deeply human,” as one early reviewer proclaimed, it’s the kind of story that doesn’t just move you beyond words; it lodges in your chest like shrapnel, a reminder of the fragile thread between erasure and endurance. As global tensions simmer and history’s echoes grow louder, My Name Is Sara arrives not as entertainment, but as an urgent elegy for the will to survive when the world conspires to forget you.
The genesis of this cinematic resurrection traces back to a friendship forged in the unlikeliest of fires. Director Steven Oritt, a seasoned documentary filmmaker whose lens has captured everything from environmental reckonings to cultural tapestries, first crossed paths with Sara Góralnik Shapiro in the early 2000s. Then in her late 70s, Sara—now a vibrant grandmother in Detroit’s Jewish community—shared her story not with the bombast of a survivor memoir, but in the quiet cadences of someone who had simply outlasted the unthinkable. Born in 1929 in the shtetl of Korets (now in western Ukraine, then eastern Poland), Sara was the third of five children in a modest Jewish family. Her father, a tailor with nimble fingers and a gentle spirit, stitched dreams into reality; her mother, the hearth of the home, wove tales of resilience amid rising antisemitism. But in September 1941, the Nazis stormed in, herding 6,000 Jews into a squalid ghetto ringed by barbed wire and guarded by Ukrainian collaborators. Life became a rationed hell: bread crumbs for meals, typhus for company, and the constant drone of liquidation rumors like a death knell.
By 1942, at the tender age of 13, Sara’s world imploded. The ghetto’s final aktion—a euphemism for mass slaughter—saw her family rounded up at gunpoint. In a blur of chaos, Sara slipped away, hiding in a cramped attic crawlspace with her younger brother for agonizing days. When hunger clawed too deep, she emerged alone, her family vanished into the gas chambers of Belzec. What followed was a gauntlet of survival instinct: scavenging for food in bombed-out ruins, dodging patrols under moonless skies, and finally, a desperate train hop to the Ukrainian countryside. There, amid fields of golden wheat and Orthodox spires, Sara spotted opportunity in tragedy—a Catholic girl her age, struck dead by a German bullet. Stealing the girl’s papers and a faded photograph, Sara shed her Jewish name like snakeskin, becoming “Sara,” a pious Christian orphan fleeing a cruel stepmother. Knocking on the door of a remote farmhouse, she spun her tale with wide-eyed conviction, securing shelter with Pavlo and Nadya, a childless couple whose own marital fractures mirrored the war’s cruelty.
Oritt, moved by Sara’s unadorned recounting—shared over tea in her sunlit living room—knew this wasn’t fodder for a docuseries; it demanded the intimacy of fiction to burrow into hearts. “Sara didn’t want pity,” he later reflected in production notes. “She wanted understanding—of how a child becomes a chameleon, how fear forges steel in the softest places.” With screenwriter David Himmelstein (whose credits include poignant indies like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), Oritt crafted a script that hews faithfully to Sara’s testimony, consulted via hours of USC Shoah Foundation archives. Funding trickled in from indie backers— the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Righteous Persons Foundation—allowing a lean $4.2 million budget. Casting became a revelation: Zuzanna Surowy, a 14-year-old Silesian high schooler with zero acting chops, was plucked from obscurity after a gut-wrenching audition where she recited Sara’s escape monologue in halting English. “I saw Sara in her eyes,” Oritt said. “Terrified, but unbreakable.” Opposite her, Eryk Lubos brings Pavlo’s brooding volatility—a farmer hardened by loss, his affections twisted into something predatory—while Michalina Olszańska infuses Nadya with a quiet ferocity, a woman starved for connection in a barren marriage.
Filming unfolded over 28 grueling days in 2018 across Poland’s rural Podlachia region, where frostbitten fields and weathered barns stood in for war-torn Ukraine. The crew, a tight-knit band of 45, battled mud-slicked treks and unseasonal rains, but the authenticity paid dividends: no CGI gloss, just the metallic tang of period props—rusted pitchforks, threadbare shawls—and a score by Irena Eide that weaves klezmer laments with Orthodox chants into an auditory tightrope. Surowy’s transformation was method incarnate; she shed 15 pounds, learned rudimentary Ukrainian, and shadowed Holocaust educators to grasp the psyche of a girl who prayed to a God she’d begun to doubt. Lubos and Olszańska, drawing from their own Eastern European roots, improvised marital spats that crackle with unspoken violence, their characters’ dysfunction a microcosm of occupation’s rot. One pivotal scene—a midnight barn confrontation where Pavlo’s advances turn sinister—shot in single takes, left Surowy trembling for hours, a rawness that translates to screen like a fresh wound.
At its essence, My Name Is Sara is no mere survival yarn; it’s a tapestry of identity’s fragility, threaded with the quiet horrors of assimilation. The film opens in medias res: Sara, papers clutched like a talisman, trudges through knee-high mud toward the farmhouse, her reflection in a rain puddle a stranger’s face. Inside, the sanctuary sours—Pavlo’s leering gaze, Nadya’s jealous barbs, the rote recitation of Christian prayers that taste like ash. Sara’s days blur into drudgery: milking cows at dawn, foraging for mushrooms laced with famine, all while suppressing Yiddish lullabies that bubble up unbidden. Intercut flashbacks—shot in sepia-drenched urgency—revisit the ghetto’s fever dream: her father’s final embrace, the staccato gunfire of the aktion, a neighbor’s corpse dangling from a lamppost like a macabre piñata. These aren’t spectacle; they’re Sara’s internal war, her stolen identity a double-edged sword—shield from the Gestapo, but a thief of self.
What grips is the film’s refusal to sanitize: Pavlo’s abuse isn’t off-screen implication but a creeping dread, his “affections” a currency Sara navigates with preternatural cunning, trading silence for safety. Nadya, far from villain, emerges as a fractured mirror—barren and bitter, her tentative bond with Sara blooming into maternal ache, only to wither under suspicion. “Who are you, really?” she hisses one stormy eve, Sara’s lie fracturing like thunder. Amid this, glimmers of grace: a hidden Star of David necklace, pressed wildflowers from Korets, and stolen moments of song—Sara humming “Oyfn Pripetshik” under her breath, a lifeline to the erased. Oritt’s lens, intimate and unblinking, captures the war’s peripheral brutalities: Ukrainian auxiliaries’ casual roundups, Jewish partisans’ whispers in the woods, the famine that gnaws deeper than fear. Clocking in at 111 minutes, the pacing is deliberate—a slow simmer building to a white-knuckled climax in 1943’s final push, where Sara’s cover teeters on exposure during a village Easter procession.
Critics, upon its 2022 festival bow at Tribeca (where it snagged the Narrative Spotlight Audience Award), hailed it as a quiet thunderclap. Roger Ebert’s site praised its “harrowing authenticity,” noting how Surowy’s “eyes alone convey a lifetime’s loss.” The Los Angeles Times called it “a worthy addition to Holocaust cinema’s pantheon,” lauding the film’s restraint against didacticism. Rotten Tomatoes clocks a sturdy 78% fresh, with audiences at 89%, though some chide its “clunky exposition” in early beats—Sara’s voiceover a touch too on-the-nose. Metacritic’s 68/100 echoes this: potent emotionally, if occasionally predictable in its domestic noir turns. Yet for many, that’s the point—Sara’s story isn’t thriller pyrotechnics; it’s the banality of peril, the endurance in tedium.
Netflix’s 2025 acquisition—scooping it from limited theatrical runs and Prime Video whispers—feels providential, timed to the Russia-Ukraine war’s third bitter year. Streams spiked 40% in Eastern Europe, where viewers draw parallels to modern displacements: Mariupol’s ghosts haunting Korets’ fields. Social media pulses with testimonies—”Watched through tears; my babcia survived similarly,” one Ukrainian user posted on X, sparking #SaraSurvives threads that blend fan art (Sara’s silhouette against a burning ghetto) with survivor spotlights. TikToks recreate her prayers, voiceovers intoning, “Faith isn’t belief; it’s breath.” Educational tie-ins abound: USC Shoah Foundation’s lesson plans, synagogue screenings, even a VR exhibit mapping Sara’s route. Sara herself, who passed in 2017 at 88, lives on through her son Mickey’s narration in the credits—a full-circle whisper: “She didn’t just survive; she rebuilt.”
In an era of Holocaust denial’s insidious creep—fueled by algorithms and apathy—My Name Is Sara stands sentinel. It probes the cost of erasure: not just bodies lost, but names, songs, selves. Sara’s post-war arc—emigrating to Detroit, marrying Saul Shapiro, raising three children while silencing her scars—adds poignant coda, her silence a final act of protection. Surowy, now 19 and eyeing theater studies, embodies that legacy: “Sara taught me fear isn’t the end; it’s the forge.” As Netflix’s algorithm crowns it “the most haunting true story right now,” one senses its deeper pull—a clarion against forgetting. In 111 minutes of shadowed light and stolen glances, My Name Is Sara doesn’t preach resilience; it embodies it. Stream it, and feel the weight: of a girl’s stolen name, a family’s vanished echo, a world’s complicit hush. Beyond words? Try beyond breath. The story endures because she did.
