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February 12, 1999/26 Shevat 5759, Vol. 51, No. 20
Film director compelled to document the stories of Holocaust survivors
TAMI BICKLEY
Staff Writer
He was, in his own words, the "all-American white boy" - a Catholic who grew up largely ignorant of the dark history of his Jewish friends and neighbors. But that all changed when James Moll saw "Schindler's List," Steven Spielberg's chilling 1993 Hollywood Holocaust story.
Speaking with the Jewish News in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he stayed on a recent trip to Phoenix, Moll said he was so moved by the senseless evil he witnessed on-screen - which no history book could completely convey - that he couldn't go on living as the same man, spending his life the same way.
Moll and film producer June Beallor worked with Spielberg in 1994 to create the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The Los Angeles-based foundation's purpose is to videotape and archive interviews with Holocaust survivors, creating a permanent record through which future generations will be able to hear first-hand accounts of Holocaust experiences. To date, more than 50,000 videotaped interviews in 57 countries and 31 languages are available at various museums, Holocaust education resource centers and educational institutions.
Three years after helping to launch the foundation, Beallor and Moll directed and produced two award-winning television documentaries, "Survivors of the Holocaust" and "The Lost Children of Berlin."
"That's when I got a better understanding, not just what took place during the Holocaust, but what relevance the Holocaust has in today's world," Moll said, "and I started to really understand the relationship between the racial wars we hear about on a daily basis and the acts of discrimination we read about every day in the newspaper. That's when it came time to make the third documentary."
That third documentary, "The Last Days," opens in theaters this weekend.
The title "The Last Days" refers to the end of World War II in 1944, when Adolph Hitler - aware of the imminent demise of the Third Reich - was so determined to eliminate the Jewish population that he commanded the Nazis to invade Hungary, at the expense of Germany's own war efforts, in order to carry out the "The Final Solution." It is a little-known statistic today that more Jews were murdered during the last year of the war than throughout all the earlier years of the war combined, said Moll.
Moll and a team of researchers went into the Shoah Foundation's archives of interviews with Jewish Hungarian survivors and selected five people "with varied personalities, backgrounds and experiences" to tell of their ordeals and revisit places from their pasts in "The Last Days."
"I felt it was important to let the survivors go back to their hometowns and to the concentration camps where these events took place, so that while we're hearing about it, we can actually see where it happened," Moll explained. "Sometimes we think of the Holocaust as something that happened at another time, another place, some far-off land many, many years ago, but it was relatively recent. And by actually having survivors stand at a (concentration) camp and say, 'This is where we did our prayers, in a latrine,' you just feel a stronger connection and understand that not only is this very real, but that it happened very recently."
During filming, survivors were allowed to go wherever and do whatever they wanted, while the camera crew simply followed. Nothing was planned or scripted, said Moll.
The intense, candid emotions displayed in front of the cameras often touched those behind the cameras. When Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone walked to crematorium No. 5 at the camp to light candles in memory of her mother and sister, Moll experienced real difficulty focusing on the technicalities of filmmaking, such as camera angles and lighting, he said.
"That's when I had a moment to reflect on where I was actually standing, on that dirt beneath my feet, the most evil place on the planet," said Moll, "standing in front of a pile of rubble that was once a gas chamber.
"The lessons taught by the survivors' stories in 'The Last Days' are universal, applying to all human beings, not just Jews," noted Moll. They are stories not only of death, but of survival - of rich lives built from nothing but ashes.
"If this is something I can find amazing and relevant, as a Catholic who grew up with a life that was the farthest thing from having experienced any discrimination firsthand, it's something that's relevant to everybody," said Moll.
"Making this film has made me a better person and has enriched my life. I believe in my heart that audiences will come away from seeing this film, as difficult as it is to watch, with their lives also enriched by these five powerful, amazing people.
"The Holocaust survivors have a lot to say, and if people would take the time to listen, they will learn ... and it can have a positive impact on the world."
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