The World Will Tremble

December 1941, in German occupied western Poland. A camp is set up at Chelmno. Its working is kept simple: those who arrive are put into lorries and the lorries stop in the forest. A few prisoners are made to bury the bodies, and they are the first to know what is happening. Michael Podchlebnik and Szlama Ber Winer are among them. They decide to escape; not to save themselves but to tell somebody outside. Nobody believes such a thing is being done, and making them believe is harder than getting out. Lior Geller wrote and directed. Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Jeremy Neumark Jones and Michael Epp are in the cast. It is an international production. The two men escaped from the camp on 19 January 1942. What they told reached the outside; on 26 June 1942 the BBC broadcast an account resting on their testimony, and that is how the mass killing in Europe was first announced to the world. The director spent ten years researching the period for the film. Chelmno has almost never been shown on screen, and there is no other work about the escape of these two men. The matter it treats is testimony; surviving is not enough and the knowledge has to be carried. The film does not show the method of killing directly, and does not hide it either. The narrative works on the difference between the two men; one wants to tell and the other only wants to live. The ending is not a rescue and it says what became of them both. Its limit is form; the narrative moves scene by scene, the acting is stiff in places, and the emotional distance is wide. Who it is for: viewers of historical drama and films resting on real testimony. Who it is not for: the subject is very heavy, the telling cold, and the ending bitter.