THE LAST DAYS A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1999 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): *** 1/2
In the waning months of World War II, when Hitler would naturally have been expected to marshal his forces in the German homeland to protect its citizens, he sent his troops in the opposite direction to invade Hungary.
Over and above his dreams of world domination for his "Reich that would live a thousand years" was his dedication to the infamous "Final Solution." By the last 6 months of the war, Hungary had the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe. By conquering one last country, Hitler planned the mass extermination of the Jews that lived there. In a record 12 brutal weeks, he rounded most of them up and sent them off to concentration camps to be annihilated.
James Moll's lucid documentary, THE LAST DAYS, tells the little known story of horror and courage of this final Jewish purge of the war. Interviewing a few of the Hungarian Holocaust survivors and avoiding the overlaying of a supercilious narrator, the story has a quiet and unmanipulative power. (To those of you who are thinking that you already know the story, you probably don't know this one. Even if you are one of the few that do, you'll gain fresh insights and see some chilling footage that you almost certainly haven't seen.)
Moll makes an inviting and intriguing documentary by weaving lush color scenes of Hungary today with black and white images of it in the height of the Nazi occupation. One gets a genuine appreciation for what the Jews lost when they were forced out of their homes.
Chief among the stories you may know is that of the courageous Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. He came to Budapest and obtained middle class apartment complexes where he housed Jews. Giving them fake Swedish passports, he claimed that these Jews were on their way to protection in Sweden and therefore could not be captured by the Nazis. That he got away with these audacious acts is a miracle, but these phony ids saved thousands from the gas chambers.
Most Jews were shuttled off to the camps to be experimented on and to die. Upon their arrival, families were divided into 2 lines - those who would live and those who would die. The young and the old, as in those over 50, were routinely exterminated. By the time those chosen to live had been processed into their barracks, their less fortunate loved loves were already dead.
The massive terror that the concentration inhabitants had to endure is hard to fathom so the film sticks to a few examples. One woman talks of the eye experiments conducted on them. They were given eye drops and stuck in a pitch-black basement for days with nothing to eat or drink. Standing in water the whole time in the flooded basement, they drank the same water into which they had to urinate and defecate. When they emerged, some of them were blind for days.
The movie's most shocking new scene will undoubtedly evoke a strong visceral reaction in audiences. We have all seen images of emaciated victims of the Nazi's cruelty, but they are usually black and white pictures of barely moving near-corpses. THE LAST DAYS has some color footage of a half dozen naked men waddling away from the camera. With malnourished bones and basically no fat, these men are reduced to a state where each step looks like it could be their last.
The movie ends with one of the women going back to her old home in Hungary for the first time since the war. She finds their holy synagogue stripped of its Stars of David and now used as a secular concert hall. She meets one old neighbor who remembers her. He says he knows about the Holocaust because he's seen the movies. He asks her casually if it really was as bad as the movies made it appear. "Unfortunately, it was worse than the movies," she replies with a look that suggests that she knows that he will never come close to understanding.
THE LAST DAYS runs a fast 1:28. It is rated PG-13 for graphic images and descriptions of Holocaust atrocities and would be an excellent film for teenagers.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: www.InternetReviews.com
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