By AMBER FURST
amber@du2.byu.edu
'The Last Days' is a powerful documentary that follows the lives of five Holocaust survivors from Hungary.
Alice Lok Cahana, Irene Zisblau, Renee Firestone, Bill Basch and Tom Lantos were concentration camp survivors who now all live in America.
The movie opens with the five people in their homes talking about what happened. It then moves to the five visiting their home towns and later the concentration camps where they lived.
These were not actors and nothing was staged, so when you see a grown women crying at the gate of her childhood home it is very effective.
Germany knew it was losing the war In 1944, and instead of trying to strengthen their army, they concentrated on eliminating one of the last concentrated Jewish areas in Europe: Hungary.
As they already had enough forced labor camps, there was no reason to put the Jews in camps except blind hatred.
I have seen documentaries on the Holocaust before and I thought I had seen everything about true-life Holocaust stories, but this film was different.
The documentary is filmed in 35 mm film which made me feel like I was watching a feature film. This made it even more chilling.
The old footage from the '40s of the concentration camps and Germany invading Europe were very graphic and sometimes hard to watch.
'The Last Days' included interviews with a Nazi doctor, Hans Munch, who was acquitted during the Nuremburg Trials. His testimony was disturbing, as he kept saying how 'simple' everything was: the experiments, the gassings.
Renee was searching for the fate of her sister, and by chance it turns out she was tested on by Doctor Munch. She earnestly wanted to discover what happened to her sister, no matter what it was.
Renee was allowed to ask Munch questions on film. To see this elderly lady ask this elderly man to explain about her sister and to watch his condescending reaction made me angry.
Watching this film, I wondered why these people fought to live when the Nazi army had taken away everything they had, including their identity. My question was answered by Irene.
She said the Nazi's had taken away every blood relative she had and she wondered what more they could want from her. She then made up her mind that they could never take her soul and she fought to survive.
'The Last Days' was nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Documentary and is now playing in Salt Lake at the Broadway Theater.