Filmmakers Sought Out Truths in Voices of Holocaust Survivors

The title of a new documentary about the Holocaust, “The Last Days,” carries a double meaning for survivor Tom Lantos.

“Not just the last days of the war. It is the last days for us . . . survivors of the Holocaust. Soon we will be no more,” says Lantos, now a California congressman from the San Mateo-San Francisco area.

Directed by James Moll and executive produced by Steven Spielberg, “The Last Days” is told through the reminiscences of Lantos and four other Hungarian Jews who lived through Hitler’s expedited Final Solution at the end of World War II, when the dictator threw Germany’s remaining resources into his attempt to obliterate European Jews instead of aiding the country’s military effort.

The film, a production of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, opens today in Los Angeles and New York.

Hungary had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe when Hitler sent troops there on March 19, 1944. In less than six weeks, more than 438,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, gassed and cremated. There were more bodies than the crematoriums could handle, forcing Nazis to dig huge pits in which to burn bodies.

“What happened in Germany over a 12-year period happened in Hungary in less than four months,” noted Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Shoah Foundation president.

“The Hungarian experience was a microcosm of what happened to all European Jewry,” says June Beallor, who produced the film with Ken Lipper. “That is what sets it apart. It was swift and barbaric.”

“The Last Days” has a subtle yet sweeping score by Hans Zimmer, and the lack of narration was a deliberate decision by Moll and all involved to set this film apart.

“Just the survivors’ voices gave it a purity, an honesty that was very important,” explains Moll, 35. “I felt my job was to portray the survivors the way they portrayed themselves to me. Most filmmakers naturally want to impose a point of view. With this, I didn’t want any outside influence to interfere, including and especially from me. From them, the audience can connect emotionally.”

The survivors interviewed in the documentary came from small towns and villages in the Carpathian Mountains and Budapest. All were teenagers at the time, which the filmmakers believe will help young people watching the film relate to it. Besides Lantos, Renee Firestone is a teacher, Alice Lok Cahana, an artist, Bill Basch, a retired businessman, and Irene Zisblatt, a grandmother.

“The whole making of this film was very difficult for me. I was in Auschwitz for 13 months and to have to go back . . .” recalls Firestone, her voice breaking as she recounts the trip. She regains her composure. “I remember the wind was blowing. Everything comes back, you know . . . the sounds. I was like every survivor. The minute you enter the camp you smell the burning flesh. It never leaves you. Even after 50 years.”

In the film, Firestone confronts Dr. Hans Munch, a Nazi doctor who performed human medical experiments at Auschwitz. One subject of those experiments was Firestone’s sister Klara, who died six months after she arrived at the camp. The exchange between Firestone and Munch is particularly disturbing, aggravated by Munch’s indifference to her sister’s plight. “My one hope is that what I have heard is true. That this man will eventually be prosecuted by the German government,” she said, breaking into tears again.

“The Last Days” required extensive preparation and planning by Moll and Beallor, both founding executive directors of the Shoah Foundation. They have worked together for the past 11 years and produced two previous films on the Holocaust: 1996’s “Survivors of the Holocaust” in partnership with Turner Original Productions, which won a Peabody and two Emmy Awards; and 1997’s “The Lost Children of Berlin” in partnership with Fogwood Films, which won the Edward R. Murrow Award.

Beallor credits Lipper and his Kenneth and Evelyn Lipper Foundation with contributing $1.5 million of the film’s $5-million budget and with the core idea for the film. (Much of the film’s costs were offset by donated labor and resources from many involved.)

“What fascinated me was the pure evil that drove [Hitler],” says Lipper. “How could Hitler, who at the time was losing the war, sacrifice the welfare of his own country by being so obsessed with wiping out the Jews, using up the few resources he had left just to commit mass murder?”

None of the photographs or film footage used in “The Last Days” is stock, notes Moll, “since highest on the list of Steven’s priorities was historical integrity.”

After combing through hundreds of survivors’ testimonies, Beallor and Moll settled on the five.

“The painstaking process was getting archival footage, since most of the survivors’ memorabilia is gone,” Beallor notes. A windfall came from the son of one of the U.S. soldiers who liberated the camps. D.W. Owen called the filmmakers to say he’d found footage that his father, retired Col. Owen Crump, had shot at the Dachau and Buchenwald camps and that was packed away in his garage. The graphic, gripping images show the backs of six nude, skeletal men barely able to walk back to their barracks.

That kind of footage, matched by the survivors’ accounts, is what convinced Universal Studios President Ron Meyer and its subsidiary October Films to distribute “The Last Days.”

“We knew going in this would be commercially challenging,” says Dennis Rice, October’s worldwide marketing president. “But profit became secondary to our belief that we needed to have this picture seen by as many people as possible.”

October’s plan was to open in Los Angeles and New York, expanding to 20 other major cities in three weeks, with local events involving civic and religious leaders. Depending on how it’s received, the picture would then platform into a nationwide release. Spielberg plans to present the film at the Berlin International Film Festival on Wednesday through Feb. 12.

Moll did the unthinkable for a documentary filmmaker: He gave the survivors a shot at editing their own accounts before final cut. They left the accounts alone.

“It was the insight to do this now that makes it a masterpiece,” says Lantos, a Democrat representing California’s 12th District. “Steven had the forethought to realize we are all dying off. He knew there wasn’t much time left. We are still alert. We have the ability to recall, to express our feelings. This is legacy.

“Each time I stop to speak to people about my experience or this film, I get asked the same question,” says Lantos. “Closure--does this give me closure? I think my answer speaks for all survivors. Since 1944, I have lived with this experience. So, no. This film? Going back there? No. Not only has it not been closed, the Holocaust can never be closed. It shouldn’t be closed. Lest we forget. . . . It must never happen again.”