The film tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust
(also known as the Shoah), focusing on the last year of World War II, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and began mass deportations of Jews in the country to concentration and extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz.
It depicts the horrors of life in the camps, but also stresses the optimism and perseverance of the survivors.[1][2]
The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 71st Academy Awards.[1][3] It was remastered and re-released on Netflix on May 19, 2021.[1]
Content
The film includes archival footage, photographs, and documents, as well as new
interviews with Holocaust survivors Bill Basch, Irene Zisblatt, Renée Firestone, Alice Lok Cahana, Tom Lantos, Randolph Braham, and Dario Gabbai.[1]
The filmmakers take the first five of those, who all immigrated to the United States after WWII, back to visit their hometowns and the sites of the camps to which they were sent. Former Representative Lantos (D-CA) was the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the United States Congress.[4][5]
He was saved by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who hid Lantos in Budapest.[4]
There are also interviews with U.S. army veterans Paul Parks and Katsugo Miho, G.I.’s who helped liberate Dachau concentration camp. Former SS doctor Hans Münch, who was acquitted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, is interviewed about
his experiences at Auschwitz concentration camp.[2][4]
Release
The Last Days was first released in 1998, and it was remastered and re-released
worldwide on Netflix on May 19, 2021. It was produced by June Beallor, Kenneth Lipper, Steven Spielberg, and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
[citation needed]
Critical response
The Last Days received positive reviews from film critics. It holds a 92% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 24 reviews.[6] On Metacritic,
the film has a score of 85 out of 100, based on 25 critics.[7]
According to Radheyan Simonpillai of The Guardian: “The film’s thesis is that the Nazis were so fueled by hatred that they would sacrifice their position in the war in order to carry out the genocide, deporting 438,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz within a six-week period.”[1] Roger Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times that the film “focuses on the last year of the war, when Adolf Hitler, already defeated and with his resources running out, revealed the depth of his racial hatred by diverting men and supplies to the task of exterminating Hungary’s Jews.”[8] In New York Magazine, John Leonard wrote:
“It is a story told by five survivors of that fast-forward genocide, all of them naturalized American citizens, who return to the cities and villages from which they were seized, and to the camps to which they were committed.”[4]
Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle wrote:
“Moll’s film is a far cry from the elegiac poetry of, say, Night and Fog;
it’s a document more than an examination, and its power of record is inarguable and incorruptible.”[2] Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, former film critic for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote for Common Sense Media that “The horrors described by survivors of the death camps, the soldiers who liberated them, and historians, as well as photographs and archival footage, make this important and educational but best suited to teens and older.”[9]
Experimental psychologist George Mastroianni discussed The Last Days and a 2010 essay by independent scholar Joachim Neander in a 2021 article posted to The Times of Israel’s “The Blogs”, in which he wrote that “Neander analyzed Zisblatt’s testimony and raised concerns about the factual accuracy of some of the elements of her story.”[10][better source needed] The Last Days Steven Spielberg Documentary – Bing video
The Last Days Documentary – Bing video
Product details
This 87 minute Academy Award winning documentary film is a DVD. This film traces
the distinctive experience of 5 Hungarian Holocaust survivors who fell victim to the far-
reach ing Nazi policies and persecution up to and during the last year of World War II.
WATCH: The Last Days (1998) Full Movie | M4uHD
Transcript The Last Days (Final) (dorjeshugden.com)
Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation is engaged in making a record of as many such memories as can be recorded from those who saw the tragedy with their own eyes. The eventual goal is 50,000 taped interviews. “The Last Days” features five of those survivors, and others, telling their own stories. It focuses on the last year of the war, when Adolf Hitler, already defeated and with his resources running out, revealed the depth of his racial hatred by diverting men and supplies to the task of exterminating Hungary’s Jews.
At that late point, muses one of the witnesses in this film, couldn’t the Nazis have just stopped? Used their resources where they were needed for the war effort? Even gotten some “brownie points” by ending the death camps? No, because for the fanatic it is the fixed idea, not the daily reality, that obsesses the mind. Those apologists like the British historian David Irving, who argue that Hitler was not personally aware of many details of the Holocaust, are hard pressed to explain why his military mind could approve using the dwindling resources of a bankrupt army to kill still more innocent civilians.
In Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” there are the famous shots of the little girl in the red coat (in a film otherwise shot in black and white). Her coat acts as a marker, allowing us to follow the fate of one among millions. “The Last Days,” directed by James Moll, is in
a way all about red coats–about a handful of survivors, and what happened to them.
One describes the Nazis’ brutality toward children, and says, “That’s when I stopped talking to God.” Another, Renee Firestone, confronts the evasive Dr. Hans Munch, who was acquitted in war crimes trials; his defense was that he spared the lives of some prisoners by conducting harmless medical experiments on them. But Firestone believes he was responsible for the death of her sister Klara, and when he grows vague in his answers, she grows angry. Anyone who worked in a death camp has much to be vague about.
There is another passage where a woman, now around 70, remembers instructions to Hungarian Jews to gather up their belongings for a trip by train. She took along a precious bathing suit, one she was looking forward to wearing at the pool as any teenage girl might, and as she describes the fate of that suit, and of herself and her family, we hear a lifelong regret: In a moment, she was denied the kind of silly, carefree time a teenage girl deserves.
There is a final passage of joy that affected me with the same kind of emotional uplift as did the closing scenes in “Schindler’s List.” We have met during the film the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to the U.S. Congress–Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), whose wife is also a survivor. Both lost all of the members of their families. But they had two daughters, who came to them with the promise of a gift: They would have a lot of children. And then there is a shot of the Lantos family and their 17 grandchildren.
That scene provides release after a harrowing journey. The movie contains footage of the survivors as they looked on the day their camps were liberated by the Allies–walking skeletons, whose eyes bear mute witness to horror. And the film has angry memories of the aftermath. One witness, an American soldier, describes shooting an unarmed German dead in cold blood, after being spat at. The film doesn’t follow up on the implications of that, and because we can understand his rage, perhaps we let it go. But I feel the film should have either left out that memory or dealt with it. The soldier was wrong, for the same reason the Holocaust was wrong.
The Holocaust is the most tragic and deadly outburst of the once-useful, now-dangerous human trait of tribalism, in which we are right and you are wrong because we are we, and you are not. In recent years in Serbia, in Africa, in Cambodia, in Northern Ireland, the epidemic is alive and well. Just the other day, in Israel, Orthodox Jewish students booed and insulted visiting Reform rabbis who hoped to pray at the Western Wall, and the New York Times reported that some of the attackers “screamed that the rabbis should `go back to Germany,’ to be exterminated, one explained later.” Any belief that also does not allow others the right to believe something else is based more on fear than on faith. If that is not the lesson of the Holocaust, then what has been learned?
Is this real life? What in the World? “Keep the people ignorant” couldn’t be more obvious at this point and still, no one cares. How can this possibly have passed as a law?? God help us. …. makes them dependent upon the government so it’s easier to manipulate them into the socialist agenda our government is pushing on us.