The Last Days

Released 1998
Reviewed April 23, 2002
Directed by James Moll

This film is about five Hungarian survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. There are so many horrors described that it's difficult to absorb them in one viewing, but there are also triumphs. Although they were children at the time and their families were wiped out, they survived. Despite suffering immeasurably in the camps, they survived. The human spirit is an amazing thing. We're resilient and able to overcome pretty much anything. It's not easy, but we persevere. In this case, the five survivors were able to live to marry, have children, and start their family trees anew. The overall message is of the triumph of the human spirit as seen through the eyes of survivors of the worst moment in man's history.

Obviously there is an endless list of what made the Holocaust so horrifying, but one of the aspects that is discussed in the film is the effort and resources invested by Hitler. Thousands of people were involved in designing and building the dozens of camps across Europe, as well as coordinating the arrival and extermination of thousands of people on a daily basis. The logistics were enormously complex. Someone asked why Hitler decided to dedicate manpower and resources to the death camps in the final year when he desperately needed them to fight the Allies. The answer to that is what made Adolph Hitler the most monstrous human being to ever exist.

There are several uplifting moments in this movie, and many of them involve the American soldiers. One somewhat subtle point is the three American soldiers who were interviewed. They were of three different ethnicity's. I'm sure this was no accident, and it made me feel proud that the American melting pot was so integral in the defeat of the German Aryan army as well as the liberation of the concentration camps. My favorite story involving the U.S. is when Tom Lantos (who later was elected to the California House of Representatives) described his shipliner journey to the United States. He was told to get in the chow line (he didn't know what "chow" was), and he was given a heaping tray of food. He was a little overwhelmed by the line, because he was still consumed by hunger. At the end of the line, there were two large barrels of bananas and oranges, and he didn't know which he was allowed to have. He asked a burley American man if he should take an orange or a banana, and the man told him something to the effect of "Hell, boy. You can have all the damn bananas and oranges you want." Tom said that was when he knew he was in heaven. People around the world like to take potshots at us, but we can hold our heads high. We're by far the most generous nation on Earth, and we know who we are and what we stand for.

Some of the most chilling moments of the film involve the Nazi doctor, who was acquitted from Nuremberg. He was able to convince the judges he was a humanitarian who saved Jewish lives by performing harmless experiments on them, but I don't buy it. He made a comment that the camp was a nirvana for anyone wanting to experiment on human beings, which was a disturbing comment in itself. But then he didn't follow it up with an appropriate qualification. At no point did he ever show any remorse or compassion, and he became evasive when confronted by Irene Zisblatt. From what we see in this film, I believe Dr. Hans Munch got away with both murder and torture.

This is such an important film. It's part of Steven Spielberg's Shoah project, which is attempting to record as many of these personal stories as they can. Unfortunately the human race hasn't learned anything from the Holocaust as human atrocities have continued unabated, but I'm hopeful that we'll never see anything on that scale again. Several have tried, and Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin probably came the closest, but they both only "achieved" a small (but not tiny) fraction of what Hitler "accomplished." For some reason, human beings have the desire for power. I don't see this ever going away, but the more we document and remember the horrors of Hitler's Germany, the less the chances are that we'll allow something like this to happen again.

Reviewed by Bill Alward  Home

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