Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch (second from left) is the main reason to see this year's foreign-language Oscar winner, "The Counterfeiters," a concentration-camp drama made in Austria. (Photo provided by Sony Pictures Classics)

'Know why the Jews are always persecuted?" Salomon Sorowitsch, a Jew known as the King of the Counterfeiters, tells a friend in 1936 Berlin. "Because they refuse to adapt. It's not that hard."

Within three years, Sorowitsch, an intense enigma played by Karl Markovics, finds himself in a concentration camp where his credo of self-preservation takes on starker tones. Sorowitsch and other Jewish prisoners with expertise in banking and printing become central to the Nazi plan to devastate the English and American financial markets with a flood of forged currency. The degree to which they assist forms the moral core of director Stefan Ruzowitzky's "The Counterfeiters," an Austrian production that last month won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Based on a real-life Nazi operation, the film is a tense drama with performances that elevate the movie to the front rank of films set in concentration camps, from Gillo Pontecorvo's magnificent 1959 drama "Kapo" to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" of 1993. The story's most compelling personality, and the best reason to see the film, is Sorowitsch, a character of no particular virtue other than the pride he takes in being an artist of criminality and survival. He is uneasy in the role of protagonist, and when his dignity is shattered, it is fascinating to watch him use his outlaw instincts to maneuver and manipulate.

If the movie has a fault, it is that some of the dialogue and interpersonal confrontations do not always flow naturally and can seem didactic.

Though swiftly paced, "The Counterfeiters" convincingly examines the complex nature of humanity under inhumane conditions. Some people, like Sorowitsch, manage to rise above an existence as counterfeit as the money they are forced to produce.

-By Adam Bernstein / The Washington Post