The World Will Tremble

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.

The unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust never cease to leave audiences aghast and speechless, particularly when it comes to wondering how something like this ever could have been allowed to happen in the supposedly "civilized" world of 20th Century Europe. However, those of us alive today often fail to consider that news didn't travel quite as fast or as widely in those days as it does currently. So, when it came to news about the Nazi death camps that claimed the lives of six million Jews in cold, calculated fashion, word of the carnage didn't make its way onto the world stage until after it had been unfolding for some time. And, were it not for courageous whistleblowing efforts of two escaped prisoners from the Germans' first extermination facility in Chelmo, Poland, it may have taken even longer for the accounts to surface. Writer-director Lior Geller's fact-based release tells the story of two runaway gravediggers, Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Newmark Jones), who fled the camp and made their way to the Jewish ghetto in Grabow, Poland, where they made contact with a rabi (Anton Lesser) who had connections to the Polish resistance movement. Solomon gave a full account of what was happening at Chelmo, the first reported testimony about Nazi atrocities against the Jewish community. This report was subsequently smuggled to London by members of the Jewish Underground, who presented it to the BBC for public broadcast in June 1942. And, at last, the world was aware of the butchery that was transpiring. From this, one would assume that this never-before-told story would make for a compelling film. However, when compared to other offerings about the Holocaust, this release, regrettably, comes up somewhat short. Perhaps the biggest issue here is the disproportionate emphasis that the narrative places on the already-well-known depraved and sadistic practices of the Nazis, events that account for nearly the entire opening half of the picture. As necessary as the depiction of these shocking and infuriating developments may be in setting the stage for what's to come, the amount of footage devoted to this part of the story tends to belabor the point. In fact, it's so prevalent that it nearly overshadows the heroic and more compelling account of the prisoners' harrowing escape, their tearful, gut-wrenching recounting about life and death at the so-called "work camp," and their exposure of the many lies that the Germans brazenly propounded about the nature of the facility. What's more, the picture could also use some shoring up in some of its technical areas, such as sound quality, lighting, editing, and a somewhat puzzling and uneven mixture of dialogue in German and English. To the film's credit, the fine performances of the three principals and its moving, emotive score help to make up for these shortcomings in a picture that gets progressively better the further one gets into it. And, to be sure, "The World Will Tremble" is by no means a bad film, but a number of other previous releases provide more effective accounts and treatments of this atrocity, such as "Sophie's Choice" (1982), "Schindler's List" (1993), "Remember" (2016), "The Zone of Interest" (2023) and "Lee" (2024), as well as the TV miniseries "Holocaust" (1978). Stories about this period in history are truly important and deserve commensurate treatment; it's nevertheless disappointing that this one didn't quite receive the handling it merits.

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.

The filmmakers have serious technical deficiencies, which is why it looks like the work of an amateur or a film school student for a credit

They can't even film a scene of people digging a hole, let alone burying the dead. And it is precisely the scenes of ditches full of corpses and their earlier gassing that should shock the viewer, but the viewer gets nothing of the sort.

Instead, they get an image of Germans behaving pretentiously and comically, pretending to be polite to the Jews who were brought there, making up stories that they were at the train station. The authors borrowed this from Treblinka, where the Germans created a fake train station. Meanwhile, in Chelmno, the camp was located in a small palace in the middle of the forest.

The Jews in the film look well-groomed and well-fed, they have their property and valuables with them. No, it didn't look like that. The Jews from the ghetto looked like walking corpses, in rags, half-dead, many died during transport. They could take 10-20 kg of basic things with them, not sacks and suitcases as we see in the film, and the filmmakers borrowed this from the stories of Treblinka and Majdanek.

For example, in the Lodz ghetto (from which they were sent to Kulmhof) 45 thousand people died of hunger, disease, and German brutality, 12 thousand in 1941 alone. The process of sending people to the camp was extremely brutal and people were killed on the spot if they resisted at all.

The filmmakers showed a scene in which the Germans and the camp commandant amuse themselves by making Jews dance and firing several hundred bullets into the air. The Nazis were animals, but that was exactly why they created gas chambers, so as not to waste bullets and to reduce the murder to industrial proportions, although there were individual examples of sadism. The Germans did not organize operetta performances, they murdered coldly, methodically in silence - I recommend the film The Zone of Interest (2023) if someone wants to see what it really looked like.

The Germans raped, but not officially, and a mass orgy with the participation of the commandant is certainly not possible, because Jews were subhuman to the Nazis and sexual contact with them was considered Rassenschande (racial disgrace) and severely punished.

How much the creators of the film had no idea about history is also evidenced by other small details. Kulmhof was located in the territories incorporated into the Reich, not in the occupied territories, so for going there in a Polish railway uniform you would get a bullet in the head when stopped. The Polish railway uniform is not a jacket with the Polish coat of arms on the shoulder, LOL, and on top of that with a post-war communist eagle without a crown. Nobody sent a chase after one or two escaped Jews, because it would be a waste of the Reich's resources.

In January 1942, the Third Reich occupied most of the European territory of the USSR, so rumors that they would be in Poland in the spring are impossible, especially since no one considered the Soviets an ally at that time.

Temperatures in the winter of 1942 in Poland reached -40 degrees Celsius and the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow. People in the countryside did not use agricultural tools from the 16th century (the creators probably borrowed them from some Bulgarian open-air museum).

Szlama Ber Winer and Michal Podlchlebnik did not escape together but on the same day, they met only in the ghetto in Grabów, which did not look like a ghost town, because it was a crowded village to which the Germans had taken all the local Jews.

I could go on and on about this poor film, I will only end by saying that this story is still waiting to be told by a professional filmmaker.