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February 12, 1999/26 Shevat 5759, Vol. 51, No. 20
Five Jews recount stories of survival
ANNE BRADY
Managing Editor
All the "explanations" for the Holocaust - the Germans trusted Adolf Hitler because he turned the economy around; they needed a common enemy to unite; they were only following orders - do not explain why, in the final days of World War II, when it was certain Germany would be defeated, and at great cost to the Third Reich, the Nazis directed their remaining energies toward torturing and killing as many Jews as possible, and assailing for the first time the Jews of Hungary.
"The Last Days" is a disturbing film. You may be tempted to turn away, yet at the same time you will feel compelled to stay in your seat. You may hope to gain a sliver of insight into what happened, but of course the Holocaust cannot be understood, only remembered, recorded and retold. The recording and retelling is the mission of Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation.
"The Last Days," a 90-minute film from the Shoah Foundation and October Films, tells the true stories of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors. Interviews with them are interspersed with archival footage and stills, scenes of the survivors visiting sites from their past with their adult children and grandchildren, interviews with American soldiers who liberated camps, and a conversation with a former Nazi doctor at Auschwitz.
The five - now a grandmother, a teacher, a businessman, an artist and U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos - relate how, even as they met Jewish refugees from Poland and other countries during the war, they never believed that people in their native Hungary would turn against them. After all, they had lived and worked and gone to school with non-Jews in perfect harmony all their lives.
"Judaism was a religion, but we were Hungarians," explains one.
Nevertheless, in 1944, in the waning days of the war, they would be herded up and taken away to concentration camps, as their non-Jewish neighbors called out insults. They would look in the faces of people they had grown up being friends with and wonder, "Why do they hate us all of a sudden?"
Their stories are chilling. Each unique. Each horrible, yet heartening.
One woman tells of singing Shabbat songs in Hebrew with children of many nationalities - all gathered in a corner of a mass latrine one Friday evening. Another tells of repeatedly swallowing and passing a handful of diamonds her mother had given her should she need them to trade for bread - diamonds she now wears set in a brooch fashioned as a teardrop.
The Nazi doctor, who was acquitted of war crimes because he saved some Jews from death by keeping them in his clinic and performing useless, harmless experiments on them, speaks in German about the camp's policies and horrors, in an astonishingly cold, matter-of-fact tone.
No fictionalized, dramatized story could be more compelling than this documentary-style production.
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