History Through Movies

A detailed Summary of History Through Movies

The movie "The Last Days" focuses on five Shoah survivors, each one of them telling their story to the camera. These five survivors are named Congressmen Tom Lantos, Alice Lok Cahara, Renee Firestone, Bill Basch and Irene Zisblatt. Each one of them came to America after the war creating families, professions and occupations, they narrate there past. The first person viewed is congressmen Tom Lantos, the 10- times elected Congressmen from California and the only holocaust survivor in Congress, he is the only Budapest of the group, the son of Patrician parents, both killed in camps. Tom Lantos came to the United States in 1947 on a Hillel Scholarship. Zisblatt escaped the gas chamber only because the room was so full that the door could not be shut without first removing her, Basch came face to face with a Nazi's pistol, forced to leave a friend behind or to be killed himself. The witnesses were all teenagers then who grew up fast now narrating their Holocaust horrors. Many of them believe that they were kept alive " to tell their story".

The film focuses on the last years of the war when the Nazis shifted their emphasis from winning the war to diverting immense resources to the "final S

One in particular named Zisblatt was involved in the film's most shocking moment, when she confronts the doctor who experimented on her sister. It was by sheer coincidence that the filmmakers had already set up an interview with the Hans Munch when Zisblatt was informed on her sisters fate, thus getting a rather unsatisfying but fascinating exchange. He explained that his experimenting was just a way of keeping them out of the Gas chamber. She found out that her sister died and even arranged to have a headstone dedicated to her memory at Bergen-Belson. A mixture of emotions was shared here.

I was always informed on survivor's experiences through the holocaust but to actually view what they went through makes it seem even more devastating. The most eye shocking part for me where I was totally engrossed was near the end of the movie, where there were scenes of concentration camp inmates liberated from Auschwitz by allied troops. I saw the hollow-eyed, tottering skeletons that seemed starved beyond recognition. They looked as though they were barely human. When they were gazing through the camera they looked like the living dead. I personally feel that the director was determined to give us a sense of how this all happened so recently because he took the survivors back to these horrific places. It was so disturbing to see the actual places of where thousands of Jews had been killed.

The film is composed of the survivors talking, horrific footage from the concentration camps, and several of them returning to the camps and to their hometowns for the first time in over 50 years. They are even in presentation wh

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Approximate Word count = 1092
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies