#Docxtor suzanne gildersteen series
When The Restaurant launched in Sweden in 2017, the website Drama Quarterly said that the series “is as brave, bold and ambitious as they come.
The tenderness that is there all the time along with consideration and difficulty.” “It’s the beginning of a series of incredibly beautiful scenes between them-the little jokes between all the seriousness, the conversation that changes between French and Swedish.
#Docxtor suzanne gildersteen tv
“Something happens immediately when Peter introduces Suzanne ,” writes Tora Liliedahl, in TV Dags, a Swedish television commentary website. While a soldier, assisting at one of the resettlement camps for those rescued by Bernadotte, Peter falls in love with a deeply damaged French Holocaust survivor named Suzanne Goldstein. More compelling, however, is one of the central plot lines in the first season-a star-crossed romance involving Peter Löwander, the family’s young scion. One persistent element is the genteel anti-Semitism among Stockholm’s elite, moneyed classes in the late 1940s, personified by Helga Löwander, the matriarch of the family-owned restaurant of the title. The Restaurant, a subtitled, three-season series now streaming on Sundance Now (via Amazon Prime), weaves much of this ambiguous history through its first season. In the years following, more Jewish refugees arrived in Sweden from Eastern Europe, although with them were thought to be fleeing Nazi collaborators and war criminals. (Tragically, while serving as a UN mediator in Jerusalem in 1948, Count Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish royal family, was assassinated by members of Lehi, a right-wing, Zionist paramilitary group also known as the Stern Gang). Swede Raoul Wallenberg and Hungarian Valdemar Langlet were credited with saving 100,000 Hungarian Jews near the end of the war.Īround the same time, Count Folke Bernadotte, Wallenberg’s business partner, then with the Swedish Red Cross, negotiated the release of 30,000 starving inmates of Theresienstadt concentration camp-an estimated 10,000 of them Jews.Īmong them were the remainder of Danish Jews not rescued in the initial evacuation, and all were brought to Sweden. But, after barring all but 3,000 European Jewish refugees in the 1930s, Sweden accepted nearly 10,000 from Norway and Denmark after the war broke out. Swedish officials looked the other way when German-owned companies fired Jewish employees. On the other hand, the Swedes permitted Resistance fighters from Occupied Europe to train, especially-more pragmatism-after the tide of combat turned against the Germans. In addition, an estimated 38 tons of Nazi gold, and more in stolen diamonds, were transferred to Sweden during the war.
The government allowed German troops to transit the country from Norway en route to invade the USSR, Wehrmacht soldiers on leave could travel in the country, and Swedish companies sold iron ore to the Nazis. The show is an engrossing soap opera with an unlikely, but compelling, Jewish plot line.Īlthough Sweden was officially neutral during World War II, the country had a decidedly uneven wartime record, including its response to the Holocaust. So it’s ironic that those of us still facing at least two more weeks of quarantine, and looking for a change of pace from Netflix’s intense thriller Fauda, can turn for some relief to the award-winning Swedish series The Restaurant. It’s a trade-off the pragmatic Swedes are apparently willing to accept. The downside, however, is a much higher death rate, especially among the elderly and those in assisted living facilities. The result has been a greater quality of life. The prosperous Scandinavian nation has taken a dramatically less stringent approach to the coronavirus, with no mandatory lockdown. Unlike most of us in Western nations, the Swedes have not been confined to their homes, glued to television screens for escape during the COVID-19 pandemic.