The Last Days (1998)

Putting aside how significantly important it is for us to remember the past in order for us to have a better future; and how impressive to have the personal voices of Holocaust survivors - I love the way James Moll constructed a time slice of history by the splicing these memories of together.

Can anyone imagine trying to buy a loaf of bread with a diamond? It's contemporaneous stories like that from five ladies who survived the Holocaust and made it to the safety of the United States that gives this harrowing tale an additional degree of detail that's usually missing from more archival based accounts. That's not to say that there isn't archive here - there is plenty, and in many ways the fact that the Nazis arranged to film their atrocities in the trenches and the ovens seems to make their behaviour even more calculating! By the time these women get involved, it's the spring of 1944 in Hungary and though it is facing the prospect of defeat, the Reich is still as determined as ever to cleanse the continent of getting on for half a million Jews (and others deemed undesirable). So often any survivors put up some sort of essential psychological wall between their experiences and their modern lives, so it is especially poignant that these people have sat in front of a camera to offer us a chronology of just how their lives and freedoms were encroached upon before their property seized and themselves shipped to labour camps from which they were never expected to survive. They don't embellish what they describe; nor is their language especially angry or bitter - it's more of a faithful and factual account from people who experienced hell but who still appreciate that they survived when others did not. They illustrate to us an apalling lack of humanity and decency and there are also contributions from both their rescuers and a couple of their remarkably unapologetic oppressors and what's also interesting is just how readily their erstwhile neighbours turned on them indicating that complicity in this eradication policy wasn't just knowingly committed, but responsibility could also be laid at many unwitting doors who might have done more, or even something, to protest the removal of those they'd known for years. It's quite astonishing how we take happy memories for granted and at just how sustaining they proved to be for so many who had quite literally nothing else.