The World Will Tremble

I'm sat speechless in the dark, and will go to bed soon, but this movie will stay with me for days. A no-build up, no sugar-coating, start right up bleak unflinching account of some of the cruelest acts in human history. Oliver Jackson-Cohen was incredible, the pain in his eyes was evident in every frame, I swear I could barely move the whole film. I just don't know how the real subjects of the film managed. How you muster that strength. Directing and cinematography was stunning, Score was beautiful, I don't pretend to know how anything works but I hope awards season shines on this film. 10/10.

The unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust never cease to leave audiences aghast and speechless, particularly when it comes to wondering how something like this ever could have been allowed to happen in the supposedly "civilized" world of 20th Century Europe. However, those of us alive today often fail to consider that news didn't travel quite as fast or as widely in those days as it does currently. So, when it came to news about the Nazi death camps that claimed the lives of six million Jews in cold, calculated fashion, word of the carnage didn't make its way onto the world stage until after it had been unfolding for some time. And, were it not for courageous whistleblowing efforts of two escaped prisoners from the Germans' first extermination facility in Chelmo, Poland, it may have taken even longer for the accounts to surface. Writer-director Lior Geller's fact-based release tells the story of two runaway gravediggers, Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Newmark Jones), who fled the camp and made their way to the Jewish ghetto in Grabow, Poland, where they made contact with a rabi (Anton Lesser) who had connections to the Polish resistance movement. Solomon gave a full account of what was happening at Chelmo, the first reported testimony about Nazi atrocities against the Jewish community. This report was subsequently smuggled to London by members of the Jewish Underground, who presented it to the BBC for public broadcast in June 1942. And, at last, the world was aware of the butchery that was transpiring. From this, one would assume that this never-before-told story would make for a compelling film. However, when compared to other offerings about the Holocaust, this release, regrettably, comes up somewhat short. Perhaps the biggest issue here is the disproportionate emphasis that the narrative places on the already-well-known depraved and sadistic practices of the Nazis, events that account for nearly the entire opening half of the picture. As necessary as the depiction of these shocking and infuriating developments may be in setting the stage for what's to come, the amount of footage devoted to this part of the story tends to belabor the point. In fact, it's so prevalent that it nearly overshadows the heroic and more compelling account of the prisoners' harrowing escape, their tearful, gut-wrenching recounting about life and death at the so-called "work camp," and their exposure of the many lies that the Germans brazenly propounded about the nature of the facility. What's more, the picture could also use some shoring up in some of its technical areas, such as sound quality, lighting, editing, and a somewhat puzzling and uneven mixture of dialogue in German and English. To the film's credit, the fine performances of the three principals and its moving, emotive score help to make up for these shortcomings in a picture that gets progressively better the further one gets into it. And, to be sure, "The World Will Tremble" is by no means a bad film, but a number of other previous releases provide more effective accounts and treatments of this atrocity, such as "Sophie's Choice" (1982), "Schindler's List" (1993), "Remember" (2016), "The Zone of Interest" (2023) and "Lee" (2024), as well as the TV miniseries "Holocaust" (1978). Stories about this period in history are truly important and deserve commensurate treatment; it's nevertheless disappointing that this one didn't quite receive the handling it merits.

The filmmakers have serious technical deficiencies, which is why it looks like the work of an amateur or a film school student for a credit

They can't even film a scene of people digging a hole, let alone burying the dead. And it is precisely the scenes of ditches full of corpses and their earlier gassing that should shock the viewer, but the viewer gets nothing of the sort.

Instead, they get an image of Germans behaving pretentiously and comically, pretending to be polite to the Jews who were brought there, making up stories that they were at the train station. The authors borrowed this from Treblinka, where the Germans created a fake train station. Meanwhile, in Chelmno, the camp was located in a small palace in the middle of the forest.

The Jews in the film look well-groomed and well-fed, they have their property and valuables with them. No, it didn't look like that. The Jews from the ghetto looked like walking corpses, in rags, half-dead, many died during transport. They could take 10-20 kg of basic things with them, not sacks and suitcases as we see in the film, and the filmmakers borrowed this from the stories of Treblinka and Majdanek.

For example, in the Lodz ghetto (from which they were sent to Kulmhof) 45 thousand people died of hunger, disease, and German brutality, 12 thousand in 1941 alone. The process of sending people to the camp was extremely brutal and people were killed on the spot if they resisted at all.

The filmmakers showed a scene in which the Germans and the camp commandant amuse themselves by making Jews dance and firing several hundred bullets into the air. The Nazis were animals, but that was exactly why they created gas chambers, so as not to waste bullets and to reduce the murder to industrial proportions, although there were individual examples of sadism. The Germans did not organize operetta performances, they murdered coldly, methodically in silence - I recommend the film The Zone of Interest (2023) if someone wants to see what it really looked like.

The Germans raped, but not officially, and a mass orgy with the participation of the commandant is certainly not possible, because Jews were subhuman to the Nazis and sexual contact with them was considered Rassenschande (racial disgrace) and severely punished.

How much the creators of the film had no idea about history is also evidenced by other small details. Kulmhof was located in the territories incorporated into the Reich, not in the occupied territories, so for going there in a Polish railway uniform you would get a bullet in the head when stopped. The Polish railway uniform is not a jacket with the Polish coat of arms on the shoulder, LOL, and on top of that with a post-war communist eagle without a crown. Nobody sent a chase after one or two escaped Jews, because it would be a waste of the Reich's resources.

In January 1942, the Third Reich occupied most of the European territory of the USSR, so rumors that they would be in Poland in the spring are impossible, especially since no one considered the Soviets an ally at that time.

Temperatures in the winter of 1942 in Poland reached -40 degrees Celsius and the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow. People in the countryside did not use agricultural tools from the 16th century (the creators probably borrowed them from some Bulgarian open-air museum).

Szlama Ber Winer and Michal Podlchlebnik did not escape together but on the same day, they met only in the ghetto in Grabów, which did not look like a ghost town, because it was a crowded village to which the Germans had taken all the local Jews.

I could go on and on about this poor film, I will only end by saying that this story is still waiting to be told by a professional filmmaker.

This powerful film is both compelling and difficult to watch. It is based on the true accounts of two escapees from the Chelmno Death Camp, shedding light on one of the lesser-known yet horrific chapters of the Holocaust.

The movie reveals how Jews were deceived into believing they were being sent to labor camps, leading many to unknowingly cooperate with the Nazis. It then delivers a brutally honest depiction of how the camp operated-showing the systematic extermination of Jews upon arrival, and the horrific tasks forced upon the few prisoners kept alive, including sorting the belongings of the murdered, digging mass graves, and disposing of bodies.

For those interested in learning more, search for "Szlama Ber Winer," the "Grojanowski Report," and "Mordechaï Podchlebnik" on Wikipedia.

The true story of the attempt to bring the news of death camps to the world. We think of concentration camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek. We don't think of death camps because nobody was held there. Jews (mainly) arrived and were dead the same day - usually within a couple of hours. These were the true death factories and because they left little trace we know little about them. This unembellished but utterly compelling, absorbing and terrifying and much needed - film sheds light on an explored and horrific true story. Brilliantly directed and acted. Attended a q&a with the Director, Produce and Iactors: the level of research and effort to tell the story as it truly was highly impressive.