In November 1942, hundreds of Norwegian Jews were rounded up in Oslo and forced onto a German cargo ship bound for Auschwitz. Betrayed, a 2020 Norwegian-Swedish drama directed by Eirik Svensson, follows one family through the months that led to that dock.
What is Betrayed about?
When German troops occupy Norway, the country's Jewish community assumes the worst of the war will pass it by. For a while, daily life holds. Then the restrictions arrive one at a time: radios are confiscated, passports are stamped with a large J, and eventually every Jewish man and boy over fifteen is arrested and sent to a prison camp. The women left behind are caught between fear and hope, too frightened to run and still waiting for husbands and sons to come home. The film traces this narrowing of options from inside one household. It builds toward the night of 26 November 1942, when Norwegian police collected Jewish men, women, children, the sick and the elderly in the dark and delivered them to the Oslo waterfront, where the SS Donau waited with 532 people on its manifest.
About the cast
Jakob Oftebro leads a cast that includes Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Pia Halvorsen, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Carl Martin Eggesbø, Nicolai Cleve Broch, Silje Storstein and Eilif Hartwig. The film gives its family members room to register the changes around them in small domestic moments rather than speeches.
Context & significance
Betrayed sits among a group of Scandinavian productions from the late 2010s and early 2020s that revisit the occupation years with a focus on local complicity rather than foreign villainy alone. The deportation on the SS Donau is one of the defining events of the Holocaust in Norway, and the film's title points to the role of Norwegian police and bureaucracy in carrying it out. Running 126 minutes across drama, history, mystery, romance, thriller and war, it is a family story first and a historical record second, letting the dates and figures land through the people they affected.
Watching Betrayed on Ktime
Betrayed is available on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so diaspora viewers can choose the original Norwegian audio with Farsi text or a fully dubbed track. This page is free to read; to play the film you need to sign in to a K-Time account, after which the Farsi interface lets you continue on phone, tablet, television or computer.