The movie “The Swedish Connection”, which few seem to have noticed, was quietly released in February 2026. The film is set during one of the darkest periods in human history, yet despite this, the filmmakers manage to portray the terrible events that also affected Sweden during the Second World War with a delicate, simple, and elegant touch. The film tells the true story of a group of employees and officials in a legal department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: seemingly ordinary men and women caught in the midst of a madness that threatened to overwhelm even Swedish neutrality.
The lawyer and diplomat Gösta Engzell is in charge of a tiny office located in a basement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sweden found itself in a dangerous situation, surrounded by the Nazi Reich, which had already occupied neighboring Norway in 1940 and could have violated its neutrality at any moment. Yet the courage of this tiny group of officials, possessing extraordinary moral integrity, prevailed over the historical conditions of the time. Virtue and courage also serve as a beacon capable of cutting through the darkness of history’s nights. Engzell manages to devise methods to use the procedures of diplomatic bureaucracy -- which he knows quite well because of his profession -- as an effective means to counter the Nazi-Fascist madness that, at that moment, was dominating and bloodily ravaging Europe.
In the landscape of contemporary cinema, increasingly caught in the grip of motion pictures and tv shows about serial killers, psychopaths of all kind, robbers, and other criminals, or the promotion of specific ideologies, this simple and delicate film stands out as a gem of European cinematography, showcasing the power of a story centered on the greatness of dignity and character that reveal the depth of the lives of men and women of conscience and principle. Faced with a hostile world that, for political, opportunistic, or hate-driven reasons, prefers to ignore the tragedy unfolding in 1940s Europe, this group of employees, at a remote Swedish government office, refuses to allow their conscience and moral compass to be dulled. This film, then, recounts an event from the past but also speaks, with a clear voice, to the present.
Engzell and his team are seemingly ordinary people, but their sense of humanity and justice is clear and steadfast, crystal-clear and impervious to the conditions or manipulations of that time.
In “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed: “The line that separates good from evil does not run between states, nor between social classes, nor between political parties, but runs through every single human heart—and all human hearts.” In other words, he highlighted the role that individual responsibility plays in the face of evil in the world. These courageous officials could easily have gone with the flow and simply ignored the pleas of the persecuted seeking asylum in Sweden, a common practice in most countries at the time. However, Mr. Engzell is a civil servant and a man of firm principles, an honest and good person -- all traits that are incompatible with the moral, mental, and spiritual perversion of Antisemitism. Here, one can also discern a tragic and troubling point of contact between the Europe of that time and that of today, with its croaking or braying voices that crowd and pollute television palimpsests, the internet, certain parliaments, and an all-too-large portion of contemporary academia. This is a serious and worrying point because it indicates, first and foremost, the absence of those firm principles that naturally guide the actions of Gösta Engzell and his group of good people. We must never stop remembering that Antisemites, in whatever way they manage to present themselves, are never good people.
After an initial period of bewilderment in the face of the scale of the catastrophe and the inadequacy of the resources at his disposal, Mr. Engzell attempts to navigate the labyrinths of bureaucracy, striving -- as a jurist -- to establish a legal precedent that would subsequently enable him to assist other asylum seekers trapped by the Nazis in Europe.
Bureaucracy, as the experiences of the past century teach us, can have an overwhelming and demoralizing effect on the individual and contribute to the erosion of both civic and human responsibility. Staffan Söderblom, Director General and Head of the Political Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, effectively ostracizes Engzell and his group, and only the Minister seems to harbor a certain sympathy -- albeit not openly expressed -- for Gösta’s work. This, too, is a sign of a civilized country rooted in a context that is still ethically and rationally sound, where the highest authority also corresponds to a high degree of responsibility and understanding.
After attempting to save two twins from the Theresienstadt transit camp, Gösta Engzell was punished with a transfer to Moscow -- a destination feared by all Swedish diplomats because of the treatment they received at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen. Yet, even if Engzell had saved only these two little brothers from their horrific fate, rather than the thousands he actually managed to save, he would still have been a Righteous Among the Nations.
When the activities of the legal office headed by Gösta became public knowledge -- including its role in helping to save a large portion of Denmark’s Jewish population -- the Washington Post described Sweden’s efforts as “the only glimmer of light in eternal darkness (…) Sweden has emerged as a moral superpower by saving Denmark’s Jewish population.”
A voiceover -- which we later learn belongs to another great Righteous Among the Nations, whose efforts to save over twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were made possible in part by the “provisional passports,” a legal precedent established by Engzell -- says that Gösta and his department “proved that ordinary people can stand up to events and make a huge difference.” Gösta and his team, however, are not ordinary people; they are authentic human beings, true in their integrity and courage, beautiful in a way that only people of reason and conscience can be. People for whom the “line separating good from evil” is clear in their hearts and who, faced with one of the most disturbing storms of inhuman madness, nevertheless decide to follow the voice of conscience and reason.
Gösta died at the age of one hundred without ever telling others about the heroic deeds he and his colleagues had carried out to oppose the brutality of horror and nonsense.
The Swedish Connection is a spectacular and heartbreaking movie, beautiful to the point of tears and perfect for a brutal and absurd historical moment like the one we are living through.
