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.
