Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28708 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-07-01
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Running time: 87 minutes

Amazon.com Essential Video
In the last year of World War II, German defeat was inevitable. Yet rather than reinforcing his troops and focusing his efforts on battle, Hitler chose to renew his campaign to eliminate the Jews of Europe. Hungary, which had remained mostly untouched during the war, found her Jews being rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps where they were systematically and brutally killed during these last days. This documentary, directed by James Moll and produced through the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, whose goal is to document the memories of those who lived through the Holocaust, records the stories of five Hungarian Jews who managed to survive.

The five survivors, all now living in the United States, movingly tell how they made it and recount the tragedies they witnessed: Tom Lantos, a Congressman from California, whose 17 grandchildren are a gift from his two daughters to try to make up for the families Lantos and his wife lost; Alice Lok Cahana, an artist who uses her painting to testify to what she saw and to grieve for the meaningless death of her sister Edith; Bill Basch, who while working for the resistance escaped from Hungarian police by joining a group of Jews that were, unknowingly, being led to Buchenwald; Renee Firestone, an educator at Simon Wiesenthal Center's Educational Outreach Program, whose touching connection to the past is discovered in the simple gift of a bathing suit given to her by her father; and Irene Zisblatt, a grandmother who smuggled out, at tremendous risk, a few precious diamonds in order to buy bread when there was no more food to be had. Other interviewees include American liberators, a superkommando, and a Nazi doctor who performed experiments on camp inmates.

While the stories are tragic and watching this documentary is a tearful experience, the final message is one of hope, as the five people return to Hungary and the camps with their families to confront their pasts and say their prayers. While the occasionally graphic footage will disturb, this Oscar-winning film is one that should be shared with family as a way of educating and reminding us, "Never again." --Jenny Brown

Review
Here is a film that offers further proof of the madness of the Final Solution. At a time when the Nazis might have tried propping up their sagging fortunes on the war front, they devoted precious resources toward deporting and exterminating Hungarian Jews. Thus, the five people whose stories are told here, all of them now living in the United States (and one, Tom Lantos, a long-serving Congressman), begin with disbelief. They had heard of the atrocities visited by the Nazis on other countries in Europe, but they never thought it would happen to them. Once the German army invaded in March 1944 that disbelief quickly turned to terror ("You were a hunted animal 24 hours a day," Lantos says) and finally to sorrow over so many lives lost and so much culture destroyed. The film is more than just storytelling and vintage clips of Jews being rounded up; each survivor revisits the old country with a child or grandchildren, to walk the old neighborhoods and among the ruins of the death camps where four of them were imprisoned. (Lantos remained in Budapest for the duration of the war.) Among the most painful memories stirred up by these trips is how neighbors turned so quickly against their Jewish friends. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

On the DVD
Steven Spielberg introduction to the Shoah foundation
Outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage
Survivor's photo gallery
Production photo gallery
Theatrical trailer
Widescreen and full-screen formats
English 2.0
English closed captioned

Customer Reviews

Holocaust - Our pain and embarrasment to be humans
Warning : This documentary will make you weep. A couple of people (out of millions who got killed during the holocaust) that survived the Holocaust (in other words the embarrasment of all humans who could do something to prevent it) will pinch you from the room you'll be watching them into their lives. You'll find yourself inside the Concentration camps, you'll lose everything you ever had. You'll be a Jew...
But then you'll get liberated by U.S.A., and then even though bad memories and sad realities will haunt you - You're FREE and HAPPY despite it all.

Nazi's hated Jews so much. And after all what Nazi's did to all Jews and Humanity I find it extremely difficult to hate them too even though I feel that Nazi's to my eyes when I see them on TV are as Jews were to them in WWII.

You must watch this documentary! It is a must. Especially for people who protested against American and British Policy about war. If U.S.A. goes into war - understand and be very sure that they do that only for one reason : LIBERATING and REKINDLING the lives of the oppressed, hopeless people. This is what makes U.S.A so PROUD and the rest of us so honored to know that in case we're treated unfairly we have someone watching over us. America on Earth and God from Above.

there is a glaring typo in the amazon.com review
the word 'superkommando' should be 'sonderkommando' :

sonderkommando were the jews who were forced to work the ovens and dispose of the dead.

A powerful film, everyone should see this one
A film by James Moll

Winner of the 1998 Academy Award for Best Documentary

I do not feel that I have the words to adequately describe this film and my reaction to it. I have seen "Schindler's List", it is a powerful, haunting film. While it is based on a real event of the Shoah, it is still a fictional film. There are actors playing parts and despite the brutality we see in the movie, everyone goes home at the end of the day. What makes "The Last Days" so much more powerful is that the five primary interviewees are survivors of the Holocaust. They are telling their stories of their lives and their experiences of Hitler's Final Solution. There is actual video footage, and photographs from the time, and it is still shocking to hear and to see, and I would suggest that it remains necessary to hear and to see.

This is the story of five Jews from Hungary. They tell of their experiences before, during, and after the war. They were all in various camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen. Their stories are incredible, and since the stories are being told by the men and women who experienced the Holocaust, they are all the more powerful. We learn how they were rounded up and put into the train cars, what they thought, why they didn't actively resist, and what happened to the rest of their families. We also get to see them each go back for the first time to the concentration camps they were held in. They are with their children, and are revealing little details, mostly painful, as they remember them. One man, as he walks through the gates says that even after all these years, the memories are just as fresh as when he was a prisoner.

I don't feel that my description does this film justice. It is a beautiful, powerful, and ultimately necessary movie. Despite the fact that we may have heard various stories of the Holocaust over the years, we still need to hear these stories because pretty soon there will be nobody left alive who lived through it, and these stories will be all that is left. These are important stories, and "The Last Days" does an exceptional job at telling these five stories.