The European film Der letzte Mentsch (2014) was shown in the U.S. with the title The Last Mentsch. (Note: The Yiddish word Mentsch or Mensch literally means human being. However, in Yiddish, it often carries the connotation of an honorable, decent, caring human being.) The movie was co-written and directed by Pierre-Henry Salfati.
Mario Adorf plays Marcus Schwarz. Schwarz is a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, who ended up in Germany after the war, and stayed there. He gave up his Jewish identity--his original name was Menachem Teitelbaum. As Schwarz gets older, he decides he'd like to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. This isn't possible, because he can't prove that he's Jewish. (Hard to believe that if someone said he was a Jew, and showed the concentration camp tattoo on his arm, that he'd be turned away. However, apparently that was the reality.)
In order to prove he's a Jew, Schwarz has to travel to his native village in Hungary to find documentation that he's a Jew. He enlists a young Turkish woman, Gül (Katharina Derr), to drive him.
What follows is essentially a road movie, as Schwarz and Gül drive through Hungary trying to find evidence of Schwarz's Jewish identity. Surprisingly, Schwarz finds the same reaction from the rabbis in Hungary as he did from the rabbis in Germany. They want evidence. How can Schwarz find evidence when the records have been burned, and most of his relatives died in the Holocaust or have perished since? Schwarz points out that the Germans weren't so fastidious. It took them 30 seconds to decide he was a Jew, and they didn't require any documentation.
In his travels, Schwarz meets Ethel, a blind woman who has been waiting for her lover since the war ended, and accepts him as that lover. (Ethel is played by the wonderful German actor Hannelore Eisner.)
The plot of the movie unfolds from this point. I never could tell in which direction the plot would turn, and the film held me spellbound from beginning to end. The ending was as dramatic as it was unexpected.
This was the best film we saw at the highly regarded Rochester International Jewish Film Festival. We saw it on the large screen at Rochester's Dryden Theatre, but it will work well on the small screen also. This is a must-see film if you want strong drama. There's a King Lear quality to it that you won't want to miss. Seek it out and see it!
Note: another strong drama shown at the RIJFF was "Gett." We had to miss it, but we bought the DVD. We'll watch it soon and I'll review it for IMDb. I've been told it's as good as Der Letze Mentsch, so that's probably another movie you don't want to miss.
