History Through Movies

The movie “The Last Days” focuses on five Shoah survivors, each one of them telling their story to the camera. These five survivors are named Congressmen Tom Lantos, Alice Lok Cahara, Renee Firestone, Bill Basch and Irene Zisblatt. Each one of them came to America after the war creating families, professions and occupations, they narrate there past. The first person viewed is congressmen Tom Lantos, the 10- times elected Congressmen from California and the only holocaust survivor in Congress, he is the only Budapest of the group, the son of Patrician parents, both killed in camps. Tom Lantos came to the United States in 1947 on a Hillel Scholarship. Zisblatt escaped the gas chamber only because the room was so full that the door could not be shut without first removing her, Basch came face to face with a Nazi’s pistol, forced to leave a friend behind or to be killed himself. The witnesses were all teenagers then who grew up fast now narrating their Holocaust horrors. Many of them believe that they were kept alive “ to tell their story”.

The film focuses on the last years of the war when the Nazis shifted their emphasis from winning the war to diverting immense resources to the “final S

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Although practically all the critics that I read were all positive I came across one negative one that stated that if "The Last Days" has a flaw, it is that the stories have been so abbreviated to keep the film moving quickly that they feel incomplete. It is a horrifying, troubling, but ultimately uplifting documentary that tells the story of the Holocaust in the words of Jewish Hungarian survivors.

I certainly cannot say that this movie is too biased since it was portrayed through the victim’s real life experiences of the Holocaust. The film includes statements by three former U. Hitler’s ways of control and extermination included death by starvation, death by dehydration, murder by machine gun fire, and murder by poison gas. She found out that her sister died and even arranged to have a headstone dedicated to her memory at Bergen-Belson.

Another survivor kept her family Jewls with her throughout her whole holocaust experience with great difficulty and still has them to this day. It is historically accurate since it is a documentary, which means that it is realistic. In Hungary the selection and deportation process was carried out in a mere twelve weeks. I saw the hollow-eyed, tottering skeletons that seemed starved beyond recognition. Their stories seem so personal and deliver a powerful picture of the realities of their unimaginable experiences.

I read an infinite number of positive critics on this movie.

The film is composed of the survivors talking, horrific footage from the concentration camps, and several of them returning to the camps and to their hometowns for the first time in over 50 years.

Each character went through different stories but yet they all had the same saddened emotions. The director’s perspective to me did not have much to do with this documentary I feel that it concerns more the survivors perspectives.

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