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.

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.

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.

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 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.