Movie Type: Politics & Government, Race & Ethnicity
Themes: Crimes Against Humanity
Main Cast: Bill Basch, Alice Lok Cahana, Renee Firestone, Tom Lantos, Irene Zisblatt
Release Year: 1998
Country: US
Run Time: 86 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG13
Plot
In late 1944, at great cost while Germany was losing the war, Adolph Hitler brought the Holocaust to Hungary. In one of the last centers of Jewish culture, the Nazis deported and killed 425,000 people in just sixty days. The Last Days is an outgrowth of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, as was 1996's Survivors of the Holocaust on TNT. Created by Steven Spielberg in 1994 after he filmed Schindler's List, the organization is dedicated to recording the oral histories of as many Holocaust survivors as possible before it's too late. In The Last Days, directed and edited by James Moll, we hear the accounts of five survivors of the "cleansing" of Hungary. ~ Chris Gore, All Movie Guide
Review
Here is a film that offers further proof of the madness of the Final Solution. At a time when the Nazis might have tried propping up their sagging fortunes on the war front, they devoted precious resources toward deporting and exterminating Hungarian Jews. Thus, the five people whose stories are told here, all of them now living in the United States (and one, Tom Lantos, a long-serving Congressman), begin with disbelief. They had heard of the atrocities visited by the Nazis on other countries in Europe, but they never thought it would happen to them. Once the German army invaded in March 1944 that disbelief quickly turned to terror ("You were a hunted animal 24 hours a day," Lantos says) and finally to sorrow over so many lives lost and so much culture destroyed. The film is more than just storytelling and vintage clips of Jews being rounded up; each survivor revisits the old country with a child or grandchildren, to walk the old neighborhoods and among the ruins of the death camps where four of them were imprisoned. (Lantos remained in Budapest for the duration of the war.) Among the most painful memories stirred up by these trips is how neighbors turned so quickly against their Jewish friends. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Cast
Bill Basch
Alice Lok Cahana
Renee Firestone
Tom Lantos
Irene Zisblatt
Credit
Keith Richards - Associate Producer, Elyse Katz - Associate Producer, Aaron Zarrow - Associate Producer, James Moll - Director, James Moll - Editor, Steven Spielberg - Executive Producer, Nathan Wang - Composer (Music Score), Hans Zimmer - Composer (Music Score), Harris Done - Cinematographer, Ken Lipper - Producer, June Beallor - Producer, Tim Cooney - Sound Mixer, Bill Shotland - Sound Recordist, Maja Vrvilo - Associate Editor, Richard Kreitman - Associate Editor
