Alice Lok Cahana in "The Last Days."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a: Director: James Moll Rated: U Length: 88 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle

(April 9, 1999) -- The horror of a number can be hard to grasp -- 6 million Jews dying in the Holocaust.

But when a victim has a face, and a story, the horror seizes your heart.

A woman remembers being a young girl in Auschwitz, asking a guard when she'd be reunited with her parents. The guard points to the chimney of the crematorium and replies, "When you go through the chimney, then you'll be reunited."

Another woman describes children being brutalized by the Nazis. "That's when I stopped talking to God," she says.

Such are the horrors of The Last Days, a well-crafted documentary that recounts the memories of five Hungarian-born Jews who survived the Holocaust.

Directed by James Moll and executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, the film won the Academy Award last month as best documentary of 1998.

The latest in the growing library of Holocaust films, The Last Days is more compact and precise than the epic documentary Shoah.

The newer film focuses on five Hungarian Jews caught in the final hours of the Holocaust, when Hitler's inhuman madness was at its worst.

Despite the cost to his collapsing military machine, Hitler stayed the awful course of extermination, diverting much-needed resources and troops to the death camps.

The five witnesses profiled in The Last Days are so articulate, and have achieved so much since the war, that the film also is an eloquent statement about the loss of human potential. What might the others have done if they hadn't been murdered?

Recounting their experiences are educator Renee Firestone, artist Alice Lok Cahana, businessman Bill Basch, grandmother Irene Zisblatt and Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor in the U.S. Congress.

The film combines modern-day footage and interviews, shot on location at the former death camps, with archival film and photographs. It's full of harrowing brushes with torture and death, poignant tales of separation, flashes of deep anger and guilt, and crises of faith.

You'll hear of a woman's struggle to keep her family heirloom, a handful of diamonds, by hiding them in her mouth, swallowing them when necessary to avoid discovery, and recovering them in the latrine -- only to repeat the process again and again.

And you'll hear of a teen-age girl who grabbed her bathing suit and held onto it as long as she could during the cattle-car ride to the concentration camp. It seems silly, until you realize what it symbolized: the carefree summer of a life that is gone.

The Last Days is the first feature-length film produced by Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, the organization begun in the wake of Schindler's List to videotape and preserve eyewitness testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Through this powerful film, more faces come into focus -- and the horror of that terrible number becomes more real.