by Jon Reinsch

The Last Days

n the powerful new documentary, The Last Days, a Holocaust survivor journeys back to the town of her youth. "Is it true about the camps?" asks an old neighbor, saying he knows about them only from the movies. She replies that it was worse than the movies. In fact, it was worse than movies can show. The Last Days, set to open in February, nevertheless makes a creditable effort to document the horrors from a unique perspective.

The film focuses on five survivors of the Nazi effort, toward the end of the war, to exterminate Hungarian Jews. The five are all now living in the United States, and one has a Seattle connection: Tom Lantos, a U.S. Congressman for the Bay area, attended the University of Washington.

Watching these people relate their stories, it's often as if your grandmother is matter-of-factly describing how things were like when she was a girl. In the lives they've built since the awful experiences of their youth, these people seem to have triumphed, and they bear no obvious emotional scars. But in the midst of recalling the past, they'll suddenly be overcome, and tears will flow.

It's important to hear that, years before the "last days" of the Holocaust, Hungarian Jews heard terrifying reports from Polish refugees, but did not believe them. Today, many of us refuse to believe, or simply ignore, news of atrocities taking place in other parts of the world.

Some of the most disturbing stories are told by those forced to assist in the gas chambers, who could help people only by telling them where to stand so as to die most quickly. The filmmakers have not shied away from the depth of the Nazis' cruelty. (Life is Beautiful, a fine film about a very unconventional kind of heroism, nevertheless suffered from one weakness. In presenting a fantasy about a father shielding his son from the harrowing truth, it goes too far in shielding the audience as well.)

Especially affecting are scenes of the survivors' trips back to the camps. One inquires about her sister, and learns she had been subjected to experiments. An Auschwitz "doctor" agrees to talk to her, but is aggravatingly unwilling or unable to provide any useful information. Half a century later, wounds can be reopened.

Through these individual experiences, we can gain a deeper understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust. This approach, however, carries a certain danger. We must not be conditioned to withhold our empathy unless we know the names, faces and voices of the victims. If we do, it's as if we are demanding that they prove their humanity to us. Alain Resnais' great Night and Fog takes another approach: with understated, impersonal words and images, suggest countless personal tragedies. Perhaps the most appalling image from that film is when the camera slowly pans over a roomful of human hair that seems to go on forever. We shall never know the names of the women from whom it was harvested; the shot derives it's power from their very anonymity.

Some 54 years after the Holocaust ended, something about it is clearly unresolved in the public mind. We can see this in recent conflicts over paintings apparently stolen by the Nazis (one of which ended up in the Seattle Art Museum's collection), over the use of slave labor by companies like Volkswagen and Hugo Boss AG, and in the interest in newly-discovered pages from Anne Frank's diary. These reminders of a hideous crime trouble us, as well they should. Hopefully, we aren't also engaging in displacement -- concentrating on past atrocities so as to avoid confronting those of today.

While watching the film, a restless voice arose within me that said, "But it's still happening!" Genocide continues: in Rwanda, in Kosovo, and as a result of our murderous sanctions policy, in Iraq. It is necessary to remember -- and film is perhaps the ideal medium for that -- but it is not enough. In order to avoid repeating history, we have to take an active role in it. The greatest value of a film like The Last Days is that it can galvanize us into getting off our duffs and writing letters, organizing, demonstrating -- by not remaining silent when we witness injustice. Only by doing so can we avoid the error of those described at the end of Night and Fog: "There are those who look at these ruins today as though the monster were dead and buried beneath them. Those who take hope again as the image fades...as though there were a cure for the scourge of these camps. Those who pretend all this happened only once at a certain time and in a certain place. Those who refuse to look around them. Deaf to the endless cry."