Jakob The Liar

Jokob The Liar, a 1999 American tragicomedy film directed by Peter Kassovitz is a remake film of 1975 East German-Czechoslovakian Holocaust film Jacob the Liar directed by Frank Beyer and based on the eponymous novel by Jurek Becker published in 1969.

The name "Jacob" is related to Jewish history and culture. In the biblical story of Jacob, from the Book of Genesis, Jacob tells a lie to his father Isaac in order to steal the first-born birth-right from his older brother Esau. According to classic Jewish texts, Jacob lived a life that paralleled the descent of his offspring, the Jewish people, into the darkness of exile.

During World War II in Nazi occupied Poland of early 1944, a Polish-Jewish shop keeper named Jakob Heym (Robin Williams) is summoned to Ghetto headquarters on a charge he broke the curfew. While waiting for the German Kommondant, Jakob overhears a German radio broadcast about Russian troop movements and the defeats of the German Army. Returned to the Ghetto, Jakob shares his information with a friend Mischa (Liev Schreiber) who wants to risk his life by escaping. Mischa eventually spreads the lie out that Jakob possesses a radio since no one will believe he went to the Ghetto office and came back alive.

Jakob is now forced to become creative to tell favorable tales of information from "his secret radio". He has to provide new items of fictional news each day in order to help maintain the peace and hope and prevent despair from returning to the Ghetto. However, the Gestapo get wing of the stories, they become convinced that someone has communications equipment stashed away somewhere and they demand the person with the radio to give himself up or risk hostages being killed. Jakob surrenders himself to the Germans and tells them that he had only listened to the radio inside German Kommondant's office. He is ordered to announce publicly that this was all a lie but Jakob refuses to tell the truth when presented to the public and he is shot before he can make his own speech.

This is an old firm but still worth watching it again. Many Jewish prisoners died in the concentration camp through deliberate maltreatment, disease, starvation and overwork or were executed as unfit for labor. Jakob the Liar shows another tragic aspect of the Holocaust and in the film, many have attempts to hang themselves or risk their life escaping to end the situation cause they do not see a future but Jakob with his own individual's unique attempt brings hope and faith alive in the desperate situation.

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