The Wall

I bought my own copy of The Wall after seeing the TV miniseries Uprising. Some 30 years ago, I read the novel upon which the film is based--a diary (modelled on Emmanuel Ringelblum's Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto) recounting the experiences of diarist Noach Levinson and his family--Dolek and Symka Berson (Dolek is Jewish--the anonymous reviewer described him wrongly as non-Jewish), Rachel, Mordechai, Halinka, David Apt, Rutka and Stefan Mazur and several others. Curiously, Noach Levinson is absent from the play and movie.

Filmed on location in Warsaw, The Wall shows horrific scenes of Jews being moved into the ghetto, loaded on the trains to the death camp of Treblinka. One scene shows hundreds of Jews receiving bread and marmalade for reporting for "resettlement". The uprising scenes show Nazis being killed by bullets, Molotov cocktails.

The characters are somewhat one-dimensional--no real development of them is given here (unlike the book). Rachel is a militant from the start, Halinka is an airhead all the way, Dolek simply drifts along.

Amazing how the film is relentless in portraying the horrors of ghetto life and the deportation. However, the dating is garbled in parts--deportations to Treblinka begin in April, 1941 instead of July, 1942. This is not an insignificant issue since the death camps were not operative until late 1941 and 1942--Treblinka did not begin operations until July, 1942.

Somewhat curiously, no attention is given to the party allegiances of the ghetto underground which united Zionists, socialists, communists and other groupings.

Still, for somebody wanting an introduction to the Warsaw ghetto, this might be the appropriate film.

With A-level acting by Tom Conti, Eli Wallach and the great Rachel Roberts (in a cameo),THE WALL ends up being pretty effective and memorable. Much of the first 2/3 of the film seem stagy, betraying the origins as a stage play based on Hersey's novel. But the actors are mostly above average and quickly make you forget they are only performing. The horror of this story increases until the final hour when it goes into full gear, with shocking, graphic violence and psychological torment. The Polish locations lend a chilling authenticity to this film as well. Not one of the very greatest Holocaust films, but a pretty decent one.

I agree with most of the posts and was impressed with the setting, huge number of extras used, and overall quality of the movie. But I was distracted by how too often their clothes were new and even at the end when they were running out they looked like they were in a fashion show. Also it was distracting that Lisa Eichhorn's eyebrows were finely plucked as if she would be concerned about looking like she was going to be in a fashion magazine. But that was the director's fault and whoever was in charge of makeup and costumes fault. I have seen this story done in other movies and think it is a very important message. My father fought in WWll and as a child I heard stories about the war and on TV there were always documentaries about it which had a great impression on me. It concerns me that in 2016 there seems to be a lot of fascism being supported.

I saw this film over twenty years ago. Still remember the acts of sublime heroism and cowardice depicted convincingly by the cast. I didn't mind the the few historical inaccuracies, because I still felt that the film was true to the desperate situation in the Warsaw Ghetto at that time. I think that this was the first time that I saw Lisa Eichhorn. I have been a fan of her work since.

John Hersey is a great author who has distinguished himself from the beginning after the war, by first of all "A Bell for Adano", an unforgettable classic also as film demonstrating a deep sense of humanity. For this book he has used authentic diaries and accounts of survivors from the Warsaw ghetto, so the story and film could be said to be next to quite authentic and is even filmed in Warsaw. It is more convincing than Andrzjej Wajda's great film of the same horrors, but this is no feature film but a television series, just like "Holocaust", "The Winds of War" and other great Second World War TV epics, while only Polanski's "The Pianist" can vie with this one for convincing authenticity, also based on a true story. As a whole, it's a great production with fine music and performances, especially by Eli Wallach and Tom Conti, and it is well sustained the whole way - you will find no difficulty in seeing the whole thing (2½ hours) in one sitting. There is no speculation, no conjecture, no romanticizing, but plain downright realism all the way, so it should be endorsed as a must, more so than "Holocaust" and "Winds of War" which are mainly fiction, for a vital testimony of important facts of the Second World War.