The Last Days: Movie Review, DVD Review (1998)

(Originally published 1998)

Directed by James Moll, 88 minutes, rated PG-13.

To fully grasp the importance of “The Last Days,” James Moll’s Academy Award-winning documentary of the Holocaust, audiences need only to cast an eye toward Kosovo.

The film mirrors the ethnic cleansing and genocide currently raging in that region, while also transcending time and place in its stark images of people being forced from--or murdered in--their homeland, loaded onto trains and buses against their will, or made to walk long distances across foreign borders to fates unknown.

The film asks us to reflect not only on man’s inhumanity to man, but also on the lessons we’ve learned as a result of the Holocaust. But if the crisis in Kosovo--and, in recent years, Northern Ireland, Cambodia and Africa--are any indication, parts of the world have learned nothing, which surfaces as one of the film’s most powerful statements.

Focusing on five Hungarian Jews who lived through the horrors of the Nazi death camps, “The Last Days” may not be as broad in scope as Claude Landesmann's relentless, 503-minute documentary “Shoah,” or as gripping as Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” but it nevertheless is a cinematic achievement whose hallmark is its simplicity.

Produced by Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the film is a series of graphic moments stacked to present the unthinkable: During the last days of World War II, Hitler knew the war was lost, yet in a genocidal fury he nevertheless ordered hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to be rounded up and deported to the death camps in Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

There, as Tom Lantos, Renee Firestone, Alice Lok Cahana, Irene Zisblatt and Bill Basch recall in haunting, heartbreaking detail, some 620,000 were slaughtered, gassed, gunned down or bludgeoned to death.

They share their stories, how Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the U.S. Congress, lost his entire family to the death camps. As a gift, his two daughters gave him and his wife 17 grandchildren.

They share their triumphs, how Cahana protected her mother’s diamonds by repeatedly swallowing and retrieving them in an effort to keep them from the Nazis’ hands. Today, the diamonds are arranged in a glimmering pendant Cahana keeps close. “They are the only thing I have left that my mother touched,” she says, and unwittingly reveals in those few words the unfathomable depth of pain felt by all five.

With bombs still raining on Kosovo and scores of ethnic Albanians still being driven out, “The Last Days” emerges as a harrowing, cinematic necessity that confronts us with our past, forces us to question our present, and demands that we reconsider our future. It is not to be missed.

Grade: A-

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