THE LAST DAYS Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. October Films Director: James Moll Cast: Congressman Tom Lantos, Alice Lok Cahana, Renee Firestone, Bill Basch, Irene Zisblatt
In a recent op ed column, New York Times columnist Abe Rosenthal writes of "The Last Days" that "we do not go see the picture to see 'new' things. Go to see again what you know--the living skeletons with nothing but skin and bones on their buttocks and thighs, the dead skeletons filling scores of boxcars because the Nazis wanted them dead before U.S. troops give them life." The most vivid images shown by this Holocaust film, which is executive produced by Steven Spielberg and sponsored by the Shoah Foundation is that of scores of victims of the camps just after their liberation. They are indeed as close as you'll get to the walking dead, ribs protruding on bodies that are virtually devoid of skin. There is nothing that this current release shows that has not been exhibited before in the vast array of such documentaries, but as the philosopher Santayana once said, "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." If so, "The Last Days" serves as yet another reminder of the most vicious and senseless crime ever perpetuated by human beings against others. Ultimately the Shoah Visual History Foundation will have at its disposal video clips of 50,000 interviews with survivors in 57 countries in 31 languages, doubtless the most recorded sequence of taped historical data of any of history's great tragedies. This is documentation that makes an absolute mockery of the claims of a relative handful of wackos who have the unmitigated malignity to claim that the Holocaust never took place.
Directed and edited by James Moll with Harris Done behind the camera, the picture profiles five survivors living in America who have a common Hungarian background. They have lived in this country for decades. All are fluent in English, are articulate (no uhs, ahs, ya knows), and expound on their memories eloquently with only an occasional pause by one of their number for tears. Director Moll follows the standard pattern of documentaries of this nature, varying the talking heads with both still clips from the past and, in this case, the use of archived films taken at the time--some in full color.
The best-spoken of the interviewees is 9-term California Congressman Tom Lantos, whose district covers parts of San Francisco. Toward the end of the film we are shown the one gratifying scene of the story, the 17 grandsons and granddaughters that have brought so much inspiration and joy to the legislator, the ultimate vindication of the will of the Jewish people to survive as they have done for millennia despite the pogroms of their demented enemies.
Congressman Lantos, a seventy-year-old, Budapest-born legislator, came from a family of intellectuals including an uncle who was a professor at the Budapest University who, like most of his fellows, considered himself a patriotic Hungarian. Lantos describes the growing fear among the Jews of his country after Hitler had annexed Austria, and although the Germans were right on the Hungarian border, he felt that nothing would happen since the Jewish community would be protected by their own countrymen. How wrong he was. As director Moll shows clips of the Arrow Cross, a pro- Nazi group of Hungarians, we see how it was possible for a typical village in Hungary to be "occupied" by only two German soldiers as so many Hungarian people themselves supported the Nazi movement fiercely.
With expert editing by the director, "The Last Days" cross- cuts among interviews with the four other principals with cameo appearances by an African-American doctor who helped liberate one of the camps (and who killed a German officer who had spit in his face); and a remarkable conference with a Dr. Munch, one of the German physicians who experimented on the Jewish prisoners, but who was acquitted of any crime because (as he puts it) he delayed the execution of many inmates by performing harmless medical experiments on them. (We draw our own conclusions about whether he is indeed another Oskar Schindler since, after all, how innocent could a German doctor be if he chose to participate in this evil research?)
Some of the more dramatic testimony of the lucid survivors interviewed for the film includes a story of three teens who had taken an oath that they would die for one another but, when a guard insisted on killing one of them who was walking with a limp, the two buddies who had stood in front to protect their friend moved away. Renee Firestone, now a white- haired, calm woman who occasionally breaks into tears, describes how she hunched over to hide from her father, wanting to conceal her shaved head and ragged clothes. As her father marched to the ovens, however, their eyes locked for the last time.
The giant of Holocaust documentaries remains Claude Lanzmann's mammoth 1985 work. "Shoah," a nine-year labor chronicling the memories of those who lived through the Holocaust. Lanzmann was able to trick the ex-Nazis he interviewed into admitting vile deeds under the pretense that he was thoroughly neutral. "The Last Days" is a solid effort but by contrast a relatively sober film, one which fills a niche by focusing exclusively on what the Nazis did to the Jews of Hungary.
Not Rated. Running Time: 88 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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