Netflix has unleashed one of its most devastating World War II dramas yet — The Girl Who Vanished, the true story of 13-year-old Sara Goldberg, who witnessed her entire family gunned down in Poland before assuming a false identity and living in constant terror for three years under Nazi occupation.

The film, which rocketed to Netflix’s global Top 3 within 48 hours of release, follows Sara’s descent from ordinary schoolgirl to ghost-like fugitive forced to bury her Jewish identity beneath layers of lies, forged papers, and rehearsed prayers.

Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Anna Kowalski, the two-hour drama wastes no time plunging viewers into horror. The opening scene — shot in chilling slow motion — shows Sara hiding in a barn loft as SS officers execute her parents and two younger brothers in the courtyard below.

“I still hear the boots,” Sara, now 93 and living in Chicago, says in a raw interview woven throughout the film. “Crunch. Crunch. Then the shots. Four shots. One for each of them.”

What follows is a masterclass in psychological survival. Sara, covered in hay and blood, flees into the forest with nothing but her mother’s rosary — a cruel irony, since the family was Jewish. A Catholic priest, Father Jan, finds her half-frozen and makes a split-second decision: hide her in plain sight.

He renames her “Maria Nowak,” burns her clothes, and enrolls her in a Warsaw orphanage run by nuns loyal to the resistance. There, Sara learns to cross herself, recite Hail Marys, and suppress every trace of her former life.

The film’s tension comes not from action sequences but from silence. A nun’s suspicious glance during mass. A German officer’s casual question about her parents. A classmate discovering Sara’s hidden Star of David necklace.

“Every day was a performance,” says Dr. Miriam Klein, Holocaust historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “One wrong word, one missed prayer, and it was over.”

Netflix’s adaptation is based on Sara’s 1997 memoir Maria Was My Name, which spent years in obscurity until a Polish journalist rediscovered it in 2022. The streamer snapped up rights after a bidding war with three studios.

Viewers are calling it “the most stressful movie I’ve ever watched.” One X post with 1.4 million views reads: “Finished The Girl Who Vanished at 2 a.m. and had to check my own ID to remember who I am.”

The orphanage becomes Sara’s fragile sanctuary — and prison. She bonds with a younger girl, Zofia, who lost her own family to bombing. The two share a bunk, whispering secrets in the dark. But when Zofia discovers Sara’s circumcision scar (Sara is a girl, but the film uses the historical detail of a cousin’s medical record to explain Nazi body checks), trust fractures.

The betrayal scene is brutal in its restraint. Zofia, terrified of punishment, tells a senior nun. Sara is dragged to the basement for “questioning.” Only Father Jan’s last-minute intervention — forging a baptism certificate dated 1938 — saves her from deportation.

The priest’s role remains controversial. Some survivors accused him post-war of selective salvation, helping only “useful” children. The film doesn’t shy away, showing him turning away a Romani boy days before Sara’s arrival.

“Father Jan wasn’t a saint,” Sara says in the documentary. “He was a man who drew lines. I happened to be on the right side of his line.”

The production spared no detail in authenticity. The orphanage set was built inside a decommissioned convent outside Kraków. Child actors underwent weeks of training in 1940s Catholic rituals. Sara’s iconic blue coat — the only item she kept from her old life — was recreated from a single surviving photograph.

Lead actress Lena Podolska, 14 during filming, delivers a performance critics are hailing as “era-defining.” She lost 15 pounds for the role and refused to break character between takes, even eating the era-accurate diet of watery soup and stale bread.

“I wanted to feel what Sara felt,” Podolska told Variety. “Not just act it.”

The film’s darkest stretch comes in 1944, when the Warsaw Uprising erupts. The orphanage is caught between German troops and Polish resistance fighters. Sara, now 16, is forced to choose: stay hidden or help wounded insurgents smuggled into the basement.

In a scene that left test audiences sobbing, Sara uses her sewing skills — learned from her murdered mother — to stitch a resistance fighter’s arterial wound while bombs shake the building. The man, barely conscious, whispers, “You’re an angel.” Sara replies, “Angels don’t lie about who they are.”

She never sees him again.

When Soviet troops liberate Warsaw in January 1945, Sara walks out of the orphanage clutching her forged papers. The final shot shows her boarding a train to Palestine, rosary in one hand, Star of David in the other.

Post-war records confirm Sara emigrated to Israel in 1947, married a survivor, and had three children. She refused to speak about the war until her 70s, when her granddaughter begged for the truth.

Netflix reports The Girl Who Vanished has sparked a 400% surge in searches for “hidden children Holocaust.” The platform partnered with the Shoah Foundation to include survivor testimonies in the film’s end credits.

Critics are divided on tone. The Hollywood Reporter praised its “relentless authenticity,” while some Jewish groups worry the Catholic savior narrative overshadows Jewish resistance. Director Kowalski defends the focus: “This is Sara’s truth. Not a polemic.”

The film ends with present-day Sara returning to the orphanage, now a museum. She stands in the basement where she was nearly exposed, touching the wall.

“I was Maria for 1,095 days,” she says. “But I was always Sara. They couldn’t take that.”

Viewers report physical reactions — nausea, panic attacks, sleepless nights. One parent wrote on Reddit: “My daughter asked if kids today could survive that. I didn’t know how to answer.”

Netflix has greenlit a companion documentary, The Real Marias, profiling other hidden children. Sara declined to participate beyond her original interviews.

“I’ve told my story,” she says. “Now let the children sleep.”

As antisemitism spikes worldwide, The Girl Who Vanished arrives like a warning shot. It’s not entertainment. It’s evidence.

Of the estimated 1.5 million Jewish children in Europe in 1939, fewer than 100,000 survived. Sara Goldberg was one.

Her childhood ended at 13. Her survival began the same day.