"The Counterfeiters" is based on a real event, but it's more interested in exploring troubling moral questions than precisely documenting history.

This Best Foreign Language winner in this year's Oscars race comes from Austria, and it unflinchingly portrays Nazi atrocities while focusing on the issue of survival among a select group of the Holocaust's Jewish victims.

The story begins in Monte Carlo after World War II and then shifts to Berlin in 1936. Its central character is Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, a career criminal played compelling by Karl Markovics. Markovics conveys a rough-hewn street shrewdness and delivers his lines like an Eastern European Brando. Sally is a Russian living in Germany. He's a talented artist, but he would rather make money -- literally -- than paint pictures. His goal is to perfectly counterfeit American currency.

Before he can accomplish that goal, he's arrested and sent to a concentration camp. There he's starved, brutalized and humiliated. Then he's transferred to another camp where he's warmly greeted by the man who arrested him in Berlin.

Herzog, played with oily superiority by Devid Striesow, is in charge of a special operation. The camp is home to a large counterfeiting operation. It churns out passports and other documents, but its greatest goal is to manufacturer undetectable counterfeit British pounds and American dollars. The Nazis plan to flood both countries with funny money, thus devaluing the real currency and crashing the Allies' economy.

Sally is ordered to bring his skills to the operation, and there he meets scores of other Jews working for the Nazi war machine. They have good beds, warm clothes and plenty to eat while their fellow prisoners are starved, tortured and murdered. Absurdly, Herzog fancies himself somewhat of a humanitarian and an innovative motivator who rewards his team with a ping-pong table.

Director Stefan Ruzowitzky neither condemns nor offers absolution to the counterfeiters. Always in question is what anyone in a similar situation would do to survive, and some of the prisoners believe survival is the only way to beat the Nazis. Sally is pragmatic, but he also displays a conscience: He cooperates not solely in his own interest but also to help his brethren.

August Diehl plays the most idealistic prisoner, a communist who sabotages the operation and is branded an aspiring martyr by his fellow printers. Only a few of the counterfeiters are able to block out the misery of their fellow prisoners, the fate of their loved ones and the implications for mankind if the Nazi scheme succeeds.

And always hanging over the movie is a challenge: What would we, the audience, do in the same situation?