Walking with the Enemy

Walking with the Enemy is a 2014 American action drama film directed by Mark Schmidt, and scripted by Kenny Golde and Mark Schmidt. The film stars Jonas Armstrong, Ben Kingsley, Simon Kunz, Hannah Tointon, Simon Dutton, Burn Gorman, and Charles Hubbell. It is inspired by the true story of Pinchas Tibor Rosenbaum. Set in Budapest and nearby villages, it depicts the German occupation of Hungary during the final months of the Second World War. The story is about a young Hungarian-Jewish man, Elek Cohen (played by Jonas Armstrong), who dons an SS uniform to pose as an officer to find out the fate of his family and to rescue fellow Jews from the Holocaust. Plot On the eve of the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, as Nazi presence and anti-Semitic laws increase in Budapest, Jewish radio repair shop owner József (Simon Kunz) sends home the two young men who work for him, Elek Cohen (Jonas Armstrong) and Ferenc Jacobson (Mark Wells). They obtain forged baptismal certificates from a Catholic priest and urge their families to use them to escape Hungary when they themselves are forced to join the Hungarian labour service, in which Jewish men are brutally treated, shot if they cannot keep up or are injured while doing work. Meanwhile, Carl Lutz (William Hope) runs the Swiss diplomatic office at the Glass House in Budapest. Supposedly, anyone with a Swiss passport can safely leave Hungary for Switzerland. He was given permission to issue 8,000 passes to individual Jews, but he interpreted this to mean families, and printed and numbered the passes accordingly.