The World Will Tremble

The true story of the attempt to bring the news of death camps to the world. We think of concentration camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek. We don't think of death camps because nobody was held there. Jews (mainly) arrived and were dead the same day - usually within a couple of hours. These were the true death factories and because they left little trace we know little about them. This unembellished but utterly compelling, absorbing and terrifying and much needed - film sheds light on an explored and horrific true story. Brilliantly directed and acted. Attended a q&a with the Director, Produce and Iactors: the level of research and effort to tell the story as it truly was highly impressive.

The world will tremble is a very apt name for this movie. There appear to be some anti Jewish votes in the ratings but go by the actual reviews of people who have seen it. Your political persuasion should not detract from the horrors this story reveals. When news of these events first reached the outside world nobody would have heard of such things other than in history books of eras long past. The story moves at a deliberate slow pace. That helps the viewer slowly come to terms with what was witnessed. You need to feel the emotion build up inside to really appreciate what you are in fact witnessing. There are hundreds of holocaust movies. This may be just another to the passing viewer but it is real and gritty and brutal. Don't expect to feel good afterwards. If you have one decent bone in your body you won't.

Chelmno, Poland, 1942.

The Germans invaded the country three years ago, annexing Poland's Western region. Jews have been forced into ghettos or deported to the East. A group of Jewish male prisoners are assigned by their captors to forced labor. They dig trenches in fields, where the bodies of thousands of primarily Jewish men, women and children are deposited after being gassed in trucks. A pipe from the truck's exhaust is turned back into the enclosed vehicle. You can hear the screams of the people as they are asphyxiated. Sometimes the gas isn't strong enough and the dying captives are shot in the head after the doors are opened.

The Nazi horde has not yet perfected the use of permanent gas chambers to use for even larger mass killings, but they're close. The plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek are near completion. Hitler's Final Solution: exterminate the Jews, Gypsies and Soviet POW's from Europe; 2.7 million of them consider Poland their home.

The film, The World Will Tremble is based on the astounding but true story of a group of prisoners who attempt to escape certain death. Chelmno is a death camp, though the Germans who come into towns throughout Poland and forcibly round up the residents, tell the new arrivals "you have endured much. Now you will get wages, food.... Just put your valuables in one place and you'll get a receipt to retrieve them later." Obviously, he is lying.

The Jewish gravediggers are forced to stand silently, knowing all on the transport will be killed. We're taken through the barracks, where piles of discarded clothing and household goods, formerly belonging to the now dead, are stacked to be raided by the Germans.

Writer/Director Lior Geller follows the story of the men, Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Neumark Jones) and Wolf (Charlie MacGechan) who know that if they stay at the camp, they will surely perish, yet the thought of escaping strikes them as impossible. "Just stay alive" is the mantra they all follow, yet this is not living. The men agree that they are 'already dead'. The makings of an escape plan are hatched after one of the prisoners are forced to bury the bodies of his family who were just gassed in the truck, while the others watch and grieve with him.

If you saw the film, The Zone of Interest, about the attempt to normalize what is going on in Poland in a house directly adjacent to the walls of Auschwitz, The World Will Tremble is its dark underbelly. Thrilling, yet devastating. This is humanity at its most depraved; many scenes are difficult to watch. This film is the first time Chelmno has been depicted on screen.

If this brutality is what we know of the Holocaust, imagine what we still have no knowledge of. One of these men manages to survive and get the truth out to the world about what is going on in Poland. They know there must be an eyewitness account to alert the world that Chelmno is not a work-camp; it's a death-camp. The route he takes, the sacrifices made along the way, are gut-wrenching to watch. The world should never forget, never repeat the horror. Unfortunately, time erases and truth fades, as we are now seeing in present day across the globe.

In a day when films about fictional comic book characters seem to garner more attention than riveting stories aimed at awakening our empathy, I am saddened by the number of harsh audience reviews for this bold piece of cinema.

In the face of increased normalization of hatred in our global community, may we never forget the horrors of our past. As a human race, we are far more vulnerable to repeating our crimes against humanity, if we avoid recognizing the subtle resurgence of those forces that drove such unspeakable acts.

This film, although hard to watch, is a CRITICAL reminder of how hatred can destroy any person, community, nation, and the world.

The World Will Tremble isn't here to comfort you. It doesn't offer catharsis or release. It traps you in the raw, unrelenting despair of its characters, and that's precisely the point. Some critics have knocked it for being emotionally oppressive. I'd argue it's immersive. You don't watch this film, you endure it, the way its characters endured the unimaginable.

Oliver Jackson-Cohen is phenomenal. His portrayal of a prisoner in the Chelmno extermination camp simmers with quiet despair. He doesn't need dramatic monologues. His performance is internal, bone-deep. You feel every ounce of exhaustion, fear, and spiritual collapse.

And then there's Michael Epp as the Nazi camp commander. At first glance, his performance might seem theatrical, too stylized, too cold. But it slowly reveals itself as terrifyingly calculated. He radiates a kind of casual, almost gleeful evil that feels otherworldly until you remember this was real. His blissful detachment becomes the perfect counterpoint to Jackson-Cohen's torment-matching bliss for despair, beat for beat.

Yes, the film is unrelentingly tense. Yes, it's emotionally exhausting. But when you're telling a story set in Chelmno, the first Nazi extermination camp-anything less would feel dishonest. The constant pressure is a narrative choice meant to evoke the psychological cage its characters can't escape.

Critics may call it overacted or overwrought. I call it a punch to the soul-and that's exactly what it should be. This film doesn't aim to entertain. It aims to haunt. And it does.