The World Will Tremble

In a day when films about fictional comic book characters seem to garner more attention than riveting stories aimed at awakening our empathy, I am saddened by the number of harsh audience reviews for this bold piece of cinema.

In the face of increased normalization of hatred in our global community, may we never forget the horrors of our past. As a human race, we are far more vulnerable to repeating our crimes against humanity, if we avoid recognizing the subtle resurgence of those forces that drove such unspeakable acts.

This film, although hard to watch, is a CRITICAL reminder of how hatred can destroy any person, community, nation, and the world.

Chelmno, Poland, 1942.

The Germans invaded the country three years ago, annexing Poland's Western region. Jews have been forced into ghettos or deported to the East. A group of Jewish male prisoners are assigned by their captors to forced labor. They dig trenches in fields, where the bodies of thousands of primarily Jewish men, women and children are deposited after being gassed in trucks. A pipe from the truck's exhaust is turned back into the enclosed vehicle. You can hear the screams of the people as they are asphyxiated. Sometimes the gas isn't strong enough and the dying captives are shot in the head after the doors are opened.

The Nazi horde has not yet perfected the use of permanent gas chambers to use for even larger mass killings, but they're close. The plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek are near completion. Hitler's Final Solution: exterminate the Jews, Gypsies and Soviet POW's from Europe; 2.7 million of them consider Poland their home.

The film, The World Will Tremble is based on the astounding but true story of a group of prisoners who attempt to escape certain death. Chelmno is a death camp, though the Germans who come into towns throughout Poland and forcibly round up the residents, tell the new arrivals "you have endured much. Now you will get wages, food.... Just put your valuables in one place and you'll get a receipt to retrieve them later." Obviously, he is lying.

The Jewish gravediggers are forced to stand silently, knowing all on the transport will be killed. We're taken through the barracks, where piles of discarded clothing and household goods, formerly belonging to the now dead, are stacked to be raided by the Germans.

Writer/Director Lior Geller follows the story of the men, Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Neumark Jones) and Wolf (Charlie MacGechan) who know that if they stay at the camp, they will surely perish, yet the thought of escaping strikes them as impossible. "Just stay alive" is the mantra they all follow, yet this is not living. The men agree that they are 'already dead'. The makings of an escape plan are hatched after one of the prisoners are forced to bury the bodies of his family who were just gassed in the truck, while the others watch and grieve with him.

If you saw the film, The Zone of Interest, about the attempt to normalize what is going on in Poland in a house directly adjacent to the walls of Auschwitz, The World Will Tremble is its dark underbelly. Thrilling, yet devastating. This is humanity at its most depraved; many scenes are difficult to watch. This film is the first time Chelmno has been depicted on screen.

If this brutality is what we know of the Holocaust, imagine what we still have no knowledge of. One of these men manages to survive and get the truth out to the world about what is going on in Poland. They know there must be an eyewitness account to alert the world that Chelmno is not a work-camp; it's a death-camp. The route he takes, the sacrifices made along the way, are gut-wrenching to watch. The world should never forget, never repeat the horror. Unfortunately, time erases and truth fades, as we are now seeing in present day across the globe.

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 world will tremble is a very apt name for this movie. There appear to be some anti Jewish votes in the ratings but go by the actual reviews of people who have seen it. Your political persuasion should not detract from the horrors this story reveals. When news of these events first reached the outside world nobody would have heard of such things other than in history books of eras long past. The story moves at a deliberate slow pace. That helps the viewer slowly come to terms with what was witnessed. You need to feel the emotion build up inside to really appreciate what you are in fact witnessing. There are hundreds of holocaust movies. This may be just another to the passing viewer but it is real and gritty and brutal. Don't expect to feel good afterwards. If you have one decent bone in your body you won't.

This movie is based on historically true events. It takes place during the beginning of 1942 in the (now famous) Polish death camp Chelmno. Whereby I always thought that the Chelmno "camp" was similar to a location like Sobibor - which was a camp with gas chambers that is located at the railway - this movie shows that the setup of Chelmno was actually very basic. It basically consisted out of nothing more than a large building.

Even though that you can clearly see that this movie is made with a low budget, it still has quite a number of things going for it. First of all, the actors are pretty decent. Most impressive are all the real looking uniforms, war vehicles (including even a gas van) and weapons. The cinematography is also pretty decent.

Where this movie however fails, is in the script. Especially during the first hour of the movie - before the escape takes place - the script fails to interest the viewer. It is just a sequence of known facts that took place in camps and its surroundings. Everything also seems to happen so slowly that you might even decide to stop watching the movie. The first hour just looks "artificial" and unreal. In my opinion, a better writer and better director would have greatly improved the end result. Because, like mentioned, they had quite decent actors and some great WW2 props available.

After about an hour into the movie, the most significant events of this movie take place: i.e. The escape. I think this part is pretty well done and certainly kept me interested until the movie ended.

Seeing this large difference between the very dull first hour and the more interesting part that comes after it (the escape), I honestly do not understand why this movie needs to have a duration of 1 hour and 49 minutes. The first hour can easily be edited down to around 30 minutes, thereby making it overall a way more interesting watch.

I also think that if they would have chosen a better writer and director, that the overall movie would have been a lot better.

I still decided to include this movie in my IMDb list of movies that are a recommended watch if you want to learn of the events that took place during WW2. I though think that this movie is amongst the lower ranks of this list that is currently one 260 movies (and mini-series) long... I included it because this is the first movie - that I know of - which shows you what kind of location Chelmno actually was. As mentioned, it completely changed my ideas on this location, because I originally thought that it was similar in setup as Sobibor. Clearly, this was not the case and therefore it triggered me to do a better investigation on e.g Wikipedia.

Considering all the above, I score this movie at 5.5/10, just barely resulting in a 6-star IMDb score.