At The Movies

Documentary Triumph At DFT

Alice Lok Cahana at
Bergen-Belson concentration camp:
The details of memory.

The Shoah
Foundation's
"The Last Days"
is a stunning
film, says local
Holocaust scholar.

SIDNEY BOLKOSKY
Special to The Jewish News

I

n his "Director's Statement"
about The Last Days, playing this
weekend at the Detroit Film
Theatre and nominated for an
Oscar for Best Documentary Feature,
James Moll mirrors some of what has
discomfited many Holocaust scholars.
From its inception in 1994, histori-
ans have leveled intermittent criticism
at Steven Spielberg's massive interview
project, the Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History Foundation. References
to "the triumph of the human spirit"
and the "lessons of the Holocaust"
indicate the naivete and often saccha-
rine, cliche-ridden ideology that had
permeated the project.
As one of those sometime critics,
and as one who worked with the
Foundation for a year, assisting in
their "education" or training program,
it was with mixed emotions that I
viewed the feature-length documen-
tary that utilized a few of those very
interviews. Having read Moll's state-
ment, I expected a film that would
reflect the enterprise's odd mixture of
platitudes and insight.

2/19
1999

The film, however, is stunning. The
title, The Last Days, refers to the
deportation and murder of the Jews of
Hungary and those regions Hungary
had occupied during World War II.
The operation began on March 19,
1944, when the Germans deposed the
government of Hungary, which had to
that point been allied with them.
To most observers, it seemed evident
that the Germans had lost the war. Yet,
with characteristically dogged determi-
nation, under the guidance of Adolph
Eichmann, the Germans nevertheless
efficiently pursued the "Final Solution
to the Jewish Question" in Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Romania.
The editing is superb, with startling
photographs from the 1930s and '40s:
Tom Lantos tells his grandchildren
about his forced labor experience as
they stand at a railroad bridge on which
he worked. The bright greens and blue
of the spring day are suddenly supplant-
ed by black and white film footage of
the same bridge with that same labor
gang. As we hear Lantos' voice, the
memory becomes almost palpable.
Renee Firestone weeps as she recalls
the bathing suit her father gave her.
Uncertain of what to take when

ordered to prepare for deportation, she
wore it under her clothes until she was
forced to disrobe at Auschwitz.
Haltingly, struggling to maintain con-
trol of her emotions, she describes the
scene: amidst chaos, with hundreds of
women undressing and SS guards
watching,
0, she removes her clothes and
finds the bathing suit. And immediate-
ly there is a photograph of her as a girl,
in the suit, laughing with her sister.
As we are introduced to each sur-
vivor, period pictures and films appear
of Uzhorod, Budapest, Polena, Sarva,
Sasovo. The film abounds with metic-
ulously accurate visual underscorings
of the survivors' stories.
No narrator takes us through these
stories. They unfold as the five sur-
vivors relate them in roughly chrono-
logical order, cross-referencing, broad-
ening the picture as each adds a differ-
ent dimension, a different nuance.
From Congressman Tom Lantos to
artist Alice Lok Cahana, the details of
memory deepen our appreciation of
what the Holocaust meant at the most
personal levels. We hear only the voic-
es of the survivors, not rehearsed, not
presenting lectures to groups of
youngsters at a museum or in a class-

room, but spontaneous, sometimes
hesitant, sometimes silent, or incredu-
lous, or choked with words pouring
out so quickly that they may be
impossible to grasp.
Those voices are the heart of the
film, but they are not the only voices
we hear.
Interspersed is Randolph Braham, a
Hungarian survivor, but also the premier
historian of the Holocaust in Hungary.
We hear Dario Gabbai, a Greek Jew,
one of only four prisoners who survived
the Sonderkommando, the special units
that emptied the gas chambers and car-
ried the bodies to the crematoria. As he
recounts his horrifying tale, he suddenly
asks the question that leaped to his
mind when he witnessed the carnage
first hand: "Where is God?"
We hear the voice of Dr. Hans
Muench, former SS doctor at Auschwitz
who performed medical experiments on
Jewish prisoners. Starkly contrasting
with the other speakers, his tone is aloof,
cold, indifferent, even as he confronts
Renee Firestone. Together they peruse
the record of her sister on whom he had
experimented.
The doctor was acquitted from the
DOCUMENTARY on page 84

