In Aviva Slesin's affecting documentary Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers During World War II, people who missed the Holocaust because of the unconventional generosity of their Gentile friends and neighbors confess that they've rarely wanted to share their stories, because it would entail acknowledging that the war years were among the best of their lives. Secret Lives assembles still photographs, archival film, video interviews, and present-day location footage into a conventional documentary package, with narration, on-screen titles, and linear storytelling. The lack of a splashy style puts the tales of the rescued and their rescuers properly at the center, but whether viewers connect will depend in part on how saturated they are with Holocaust lore. Secret Lives offers a renewed chance to contemplate the dichotomy of cruelty and compassion in the human character, but those who've been through this particular narrative grinder before may wish that Slesin had asked her subjects more about the specifics of daily life, and gotten more responses along the lines of one interviewee's admission about how much he enjoyed celebrating Christmas. Regardless, the alert and the exhausted alike should be moved by the final third of Secret Lives, which deals with the aftermath of the war, when "the rescued" returned to parents or other relatives permanently scarred by life in concentration camps. Not only were the children taken from the arms of the guardians they had known for most of their lives, but they also grew up tormented by memories of long-gone, ideal-in-retrospect families. Even the heroes of the story–the ordinary citizens who did the right thing when it counted–recall the awkward limbo of the postwar years. One woman, who didn't have to say goodbye because she saw her former charge on a regular basis after his mother returned, still expresses embarrassment about the imbalance in their relationship. "It's awful," she says about the mother's feelings of indebtedness, "to have to be so thankful."