The Reel Review
Jewish detainees at the Chelmno Concentration Camp in 1942 Poland plot their escape to warn the world that the occupying Nazi Germans are not sending Jews to work camps in Germany as promised but rather are exterminating them and others they have deemed undesirable. Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Neumark Jones star in this incredible, previously untold, historical war drama based on actual World War II events.
With a meticulous attention to detail and accuracy, Israeli/American writer/director Lior Geller captures the surreal, gut-wrenching physical and psychological horror of the early months of Holocaust. Jackson-Cohen (The Invisible Man, The Haunting of Hill House) and Jones (The Feed) both give pulse-pounding, lived-in performances as the two camp detainees who make their daring escape. Before that, we see them bury some of the thousands of Jews, including their own family members killed by carbon-monoxide gas poisoning in vans, a precursor to the stationary gas chambers of the larger Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka extermination camps.
The straightforward film doesn’t pull any punches, highlighting the many horrors, from Nazis cruelly misleading Jews that they would be reunited with their belongings once in Germany, local Polish people ratting out camp escapees in exchange for bounties and the unwillingness of not-yet-imprisoned Jews to accept the reality of what was happening around them. The final act is unflinching, harrowing and unsettling. The World Will Tremble is an important addition to the pantheon of Holocaust films.
REEL FACTS
• The June 26, 1942 BBC broadcast, based on Solomon Wiener and Michael Podchlebnik’s harrowing eyewitness accounts at the Chelmno Extermination Camp, was the first time the world learned of the Holocaust. Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, an estimated 150,000-300,000 were killed at Chelmno.
• A small group, usually between 600-1000 men, typically were allowed to live for a few extra weeks in exchange for sorting the belongings of detainees, running gas chambers, and disposing of the dead, only to then be killed themselves, replaced by new temporary workers.
• Although set in Poland, The World Will Tremble was filmed in Bulgaria.
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