Cast: Bill Basch, Martin Basch, Randolph Braham
Director: James Moll
Screenplay: N/A

Synopsis: Five Jewish Hungarians, now U.S. citizens, tell their stories: before March, 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April, 1945, also comment [1].

Review:

“The Last Days” is an unsettling documentary about five Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The images, the stories, and especially the wartime footage of the actual condition of the camp survivors paints a visceral picture of what humanity is capable of in its darkest hours. The images that haunt me from the documentary are the wartime videos of those poor tortured souls walking around after the concentration camps had been freed. I have never actually seen real footage from the concentration camps, and it is truly disturbing to bear witness to such atrocities. The stories told from the different perspectives helps to give us a breadth and frightening reality check of how eerily efficient the Nazi’s were in exterminating Jews, from cataloging their belongings to branding them with numbers, stripping away all dignity and identity in a most brutal fashion. The most telling of these stories are the details: “Renée packing her bathing suit, Irene swallowing the diamonds her mother gave her to buy bread, Alice’s memorial for her sister Klara, Bill escaping police by jumping into a line of Jews going to Buchenwald, and Tom told by a US soldier to have ‘all the damn bananas and oranges you can eat.’” [1]

One of the moments that really stood out for me was when one of the survivors actually confronted one of the Nazi scientists that did experiments at the camp where she was held to find out any details she could about her sister. From the conversation, we could see that the Nazi scientist thought about the events more in a matter of fact way, that he was simply doing what he was told, and that he did not really respond to any of the brutality or barbarianism of the experiments. It was chilling when one realizes that he looked at the Jews as mostly subjects in his experiments. The moment of his redemption came when he realized he could save Jews by keeping them in his lab by doing non-invasive experiments.

In summary, one of the key lessons I took from these stories is how they did not expect to actually be taken to the camps. We need to learn from history and remember that the movement of the Jews to the camps did not happen overnight. At this time, there was a culture of propaganda, nationalism, and idealism. The citizens of Germany voted in these laws, and actions were taken under the rule of law over time. First the Jews would be singled out as agitators and therefore marked. Then they would be deemed unfit for living amongst the citizenry and so would be moved to ghettos. After this, they were told that they would be taken to better living quarters after riding on the train. After getting into the camps, they would be cataloged, and then put to work. The scope and efficiency of this extermination of an entire race of people cannot be understated in its breadth and depth, especially in the last days, under the “Final Solution.” One can only hope that when there are no more eye witnesses of the atrocities left, we will still remember these events, learn from them, and prevent them from happening.

References:

  1. “The Last Days.” IMDb: The Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com-Amazon.com, 1990-2014. Wed. 16 April 2014. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0174852/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt>.
  2. “The Last Days.” Rotten Tomatoes.com, 2014. Wed. 16 April 2014. < http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1084588-last_days/>.
  3. “The Last Days.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2014. Wed. 16 April 2014. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Days>.