# Last Days, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

    THE LAST DAYS
    (October)
    Featuring:  Tom Lantos, Alice Lok Cahana, Renee Firestone, Bill Basch,
    Irene Zisblatt.
    Producers:  June Beallor and Ken Lipper.
    Director:  James Moll.
    MPAA Rating:  PG-13 (adult themes)
    Running Time:  87 minutes.
    Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

There's more than a touch of irony to the title of THE LAST DAYS, the first feature film project from Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. On the surface it refers to the time when the film's five principal subjects -- Hungarian-born Holocaust survivors Tom Lantos, Renee Firestone, Alice Lok Cahana, Bill Basch and Irene Zisblatt -- were taken from their homeland in 1944, as Germany saw its chances at winning the war slip away and made a last desperate attempt to complete Hitler's Final Solution. Yet for these five people and thousands of other survivors like them, the last days were only the beginning, the first days of a lifetime spent trying to make sense of what had been taken from them.

It's this concern with the world of the survivors -- rather than simply the world of the concentration camp internees -- that makes THE LAST DAYS more than "just another Holocaust documentary." The film is told entirely by witnesses to the Holocaust, without a moment of narration, yet accounts of attrocities in the camps make up a relatively small portion of the film. There are certainly many powerful recollections in the survivor testimony, the kind that can make you cry out in pain. Irene Zisblatt tells a tale of preserving the family diamonds that makes Christopher Walken's gold watch monologue in PULP FICTION seem appallingly banal; she describes seeing two children killed, and realizing "that's when I stopped talking to God." Director James Moll also uncovers rare footage for which no adjectives will suffice, images shot by liberating Allied forces of skeletal survivors walking in a ghostly parade.

As effectively as THE LAST DAYS captures the "during" of the Holocaust, it also takes time to explore both the "before" and the "after." If there is anywhere it disappoints, it is in capturing the uniqueness of this particular "before." Bill Basch ruefully notes in the film's opening moments the absurdity of Hitler's late push to add the Hungarian Jews to his European slaughter -- "killing Jews," Basch says, "was more important than winning the war" -- but Moll doesn't build on that premise. While his focus on the survivors keeps the story personal, it doesn't allow for a perspective on what was happening in the bigger picture of 1944, and how a different allocation of resources by the Germans might have changed that picture. Accounts of how Hungarians believed the stories drifting in from Poland could never happen in their own country feel more like generic back-story than a context for this particular phase of the genocide.

Ultimately, however, Moll finds his most powerful stories in the "after." There is still 35 minutes of screen time left when the war ends, leaving us with stories of our five narrators trying to pick up the pieces. We see scenes of the survivors returned to Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen with their families, memories and tears washing over them. We see Renee Firestone visiting her childhood home, and breaking down at finding a locked gate. We see Firestone confronting a German concentration camp physician with evidence that he experimented on her sister, receiving evasive responses to the medical records like "yes, everything normal." Most significantly, we see the survivors turning their experiences into art (by Lok Cahana), into political action (by Lantos, now a California Congressman), into education for another generation (by Firestone in lectures). Their days in concentration camps could have been the last days for these five individuals, either for their lives or for their souls. THE LAST DAYS shows survivors in action, seeking resolution, working for a world that will never forget.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 survivor stories:  8.

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