Allan McGregor

Entertaining hokum, somewhere between thriller and farce, with over-intricate subplots, but that's crime FICTION for you. As an ex-cop who later retrained as a nurse, I am used to inexpertly written scripts (like estimating a time of death that narrowly despite the corpse having been frozen in a chest freezer). But the whole secret to enjoying TV drama is employing the art of the "suspension of disbelief."

A gripping story from start to finish, and although the "Written by..." caption is a hint that its claim to "be based on true events..." is very loosely "based" if at all in any literal sense. But rather in the way that an "Impressionist" artist can capture the essence of an actual moment, this film encapsulates the horror of the Holocaust in so many ways. Even the title is deliberately ambiguous, as it is more about the "Lessons" than the "Persian". For example, Kurt personifies the old axiom: "You cannot con an honest man," as here we see him trapped by own desire to believe the Gilles' claim to be Persian, intertwined with his deluded vanity that he is cleverer than all of his subordinates. A number of other things that stick out are theological: eg. when Gilles swaps his sandwich for the "Persian" book in the back of the truck and re ears that his father is a rabbi, whilst he personally is not devout, he nevertheless berates his fellow Jew by reminding him that the "Eighth Commandment is: 'Thou shalt not steal'," yet which characterises his conduct throughout the remainder of the entire film, whilst demonstrating the transcendent Commandment that stands above all others in the Torah: "Choose Life!" -- which is exactly what he does -- albeit, his own, Then, towards the end, Kurt's self-deception is fully exposed when he angily argues that he is "not a murderer," -- because, just like his superiors, then busily burning the Camp records, every Nazi involved in the Holocaust knew thoughout that what they were doing was evil. But the coup de grace was the way that, of the 25,000 to 30,000 exterminated prisoners who passed through the camp, Gilles had disguised the full names of 2,840 of them, using his fake Farsi as an aide memoire -- which again according to Jewish tradition, memorialises them for posterity.