Given the efficiency of the Nazi machine and the incomprehensible scale of its death-camp atrocities, it sometimes seems like a wonder that any of Europe's Jews made it through WWII alive. Every story of survival seems remarkable and unique. At the same time, most of those stories, examined closely, are composed of the same minute day-to-day struggles, repeated with minor variations on a theme. The miraculous meets the mundane head-on in The Nazi Officer's Wife, a well-crafted but frustratingly superficial documentary about Edith Hahn Beer, an Austrian Jew who survived the Hitler years under a false identity. Oscar-nominated director Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, USA) stitches together archival footage, stock images, photographs, and interviews to retell the story from Beer's autobiography, The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived The Holocaust. In voiceover, Susan Sarandon provides a historical overview that ties events together, while Julia Ormond fills the gaps with readings from Beer's book. The story is told almost entirely from Beer's limited perspective: A forceful, ambitious Viennese law student during Hitler's rise to power, she saw the Nazi regime as a mere political fad. In her view, months and even years zip by in the blink of an eye, as her family is torn apart, she's sent to a forced-labor farm, and Germany goes to war. With the help of a few sympathetic strangers and an old friend, she acquires a new ID, moves to Munich, joins the Red Cross to avoid being put on a national registry as a war-effort aid worker, and meets a staunch Nazi factory manager who professes love for her and proposes. The present-day Beer describes these developments matter-of-factly: She occasionally chokes up when describing a youthful love affair that melted under the pressure of growing Austrian anti-Semitism, or the startlingly trivial final letter from her mother, who was unaware of what lay ahead, but mostly she offers a clear-headed, ground-level perspective on an extraordinary series of events. But Garbus' film functions primarily as a visual supplement to and unwitting commercial for Beer's book. Ormond's readings open up Beer's story as no other part of the film does; Garbus' talking heads, stock footage, and repetitive views of the same few photos lack intimacy, and Beer, who kept this story secret most of her life, mostly sticks to objective facts in her interviews. But her book (written with Susan Dworkin) admits to emotions, hopes, dreams, and fears that the film adaptation frustratingly fails to depict. Somewhere between the lines, Beer's story is rich in ethical dilemma, political and religious struggle and betrayal, sexism and racism, glaring irony, love and hatred and messy middle grounds, and all the human conflict WWII can muster. But as far as Garbus' film is concerned, it's all just reportage, and a bunch of old black-and-white images, frozen in time. The surface details are compelling on their own, but Beer's book goes deeper, proving that the real story is the internal one, the one that goes beyond mundane external events into the realm of personal miracles.