For as long as I can remember, the Holocaust has represented for me the complete and utter absence of physical freedom. I’ve seen Holocaust films where Jews fought back, found meaning in the smallest things, tried like hell to maintain some dignity and Jewish customs, used their talents to improve their survival odds, and so on.
But until I saw “The World Will Tremble” the other night at an LA Jewish Film Festival premiere in Beverly Hills, I had never seen a Holocaust film where Jews manage to actually escape from the clutches of the Nazis.
I won’t spoil the story for you, but how the film came to be made is a story in itself. Israeli director Lior Geller, who was at the screening, shared with the audience his 12-year journey of “investigative screenwriting” to excavate this little-known story of two Jews who miraculously escape the Chelmno extermination camp in Poland in 1942. We learn that Chelmno is the first instance of a camp devoted exclusively to the mass murder of Jews.
Geller needed years of digging because the details of the story were so hard to come by. With the help of Yad Vashem and Holocaust scholars, he eventually dug into enough archives and talked to enough people to write a screenplay that would do justice to the story.
The story of the escape drives the film, but it still can’t take the edge off the horrific scenes of human carnage. The horror itself is what I usually take away from other Holocaust films. The horror and the distance. The horror is there, and I’m here, a free man, a universe away.
In “The World Will Tremble,” I took away something besides the horror. It wasn’t the usual themes of struggle and eternal resilience. No, it was the possibility of real, genuine physical freedom; the possibility that those two starving Jewish prisoners running from Nazis in a freezing Polish forest were crossing a universe and coming to me.
They were coming to that simple place here in America we call freedom.
The only difference is that while we gorge on freedom all day long, our two heroes scrounge with hawkish eyes for any tiny sliver of possible freedom that might come their way. A little blade here, a ripped canvas there, a lucky swim in a frigid river, a chance encounter with a benevolent Polish woman, finding a rabbi in a deserted village, and so on. Those were tiny slivers, yes, but they were still freedom.
Because this is still a Holocaust movie, we find ourselves at the end with the familiar feelings of bitterness at the world’s failure to rescue the Jews before we lost 6 million.
But here again, the film offers a twist. The story it tells of the mass murder of Jews through the crude use of trucks as portable gas chambers was the precursor to the concentration camps. The escape story, then, had two layers: the prisoners wanted the story itself to escape so the world would have a chance to do something about it.
By the time the story got to the U.S., only one newspaper put it on its front page. It was not the Jewish-owned New York Times. As Geller informed us at the screening, it was an African-American paper, the Pittsburgh Courrier.
Evidently, the only media company that “trembled” was the one who knew better than to take the tiniest sliver of freedom for granted.
