AS powerful and disturbing as you would expect, “The Last Days” is the first feature-length documentary from Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Unlike previous, wider-ranging Holocaust documentaries, it deals solely with the terrible fate of Hungary’s Jewry in the waning days of World War II, and it depicts that fate by focusing on the experiences of just five people.
As a result, “The Last Days” is not only remarkably calm and, for the most part, unmanipulative for a project associated with Spielberg, it does a superb job of making the Holocaust vividly immediate.
By giving his subjects a pre-war context, by showing that the pajama-clad, shaved-head skeletal beings in the camps had normal lives before Night fell in March 1944, director James Moll gives them back some of their humanity.
It was then that Hungary, a Nazi ally, became the last country to be invaded by the Germans, and that the deportations and high-speed destruction of its 850,000 strong, highly assimilated Jewish community began.
The film follows the five survivors – Tom Lantos, Alice Lok Cahana, Renee Firestone, Bill Basch and Irene Zisblatt – back to their former homes in Hungary and to various ghettos and camps. The filmmakers selected five unusually articulate people with radically different pre-war lives. Indeed, all that the five had in common at the beginning of 1944 was Jewish faith.
Background information is provided by newsreels, a historian-survivor and Dr. Hans Munch, a Nazi doctor in charge of medical experiments on human beings at Auschwitz. There’s an extraordinary, chilling moment in the film when one of the five asks Munch what procedures were performed on her murdered sister.
There is remarkable power in the little details the five tell us of the last days before cattle trains. But perhaps the most amazing thing about “The Last Days” is the never-before-seen color footage from a liberated death camp that takes these familiar horrors out of history and makes them shockingly immediate and real.
That’s why it is all the more irritating that, in the last third of the film, Moll drops his strict documentary integrity. Some scenes of the survivors turning up in their old hometowns and meeting Hungarians they once knew clearly were staged. The locals, who never once glance at the American camera crew, have obviously been prepped, if not rehearsed.
More disturbing are some gratuitous scenes of the survivors wandering about Auschwitz and other camps. The problem is not simply that they are obviously under pressure to say something ringing about man’s inhumanity to man. What’s galling are the unnecessary shots of them breaking down in tears.
What we have already seen and heard is distressing enough; there is something almost pornographic about taking Holocaust survivors back to a death camp so you can film them crying.
———–
THE LAST DAYS
Documentary. Directed by James Moll. Running time: 87 minutes. Unrated. At 62nd and Broadway.