‘My film finally tells the story of the first escape from a Nazi death camp’

Next month sees the release of The World Will Tremble, a new film based on a true story about the first escape from a Nazi extermination camp. There were, of course, very few escapes. But this one, from Chelmno, resulted in the first testimony of the Holocaust to reach the wider world, which in turn led to the BBC broadcasting the first news report about the mass extermination of Jews.

To some the film’s title will have a whiff of irony given that the world did not tremble enough to stop or even hamper the murder of millions more. However, this does not diminish the harrowing story of Michael Podchlebnik and Solomon Weiner, who escaped from Chelmno in Poland while being transported to the zone where they were to be made to dig mass graves for the latest batch of gassed Jews.

I didn’t set out to make a film about the Holocaust. I came across this story while researching my own family’s history in the Shoah

“I didn’t set out to make a film about the Holocaust,” says the movie’s Israeli director Lior Geller, who is speaking via video call from his office just outside Los Angeles where he is based. “I came across this story while researching my own family’s history in the Shoah,” he explains.

Film director Lior Geller Photo: Tal Lazar[Missing Credit]

But first there is the matter of the term “Holocaust film”. He doesn’t like it. “It’s reductive and is not respectful to individuals. I don’t think the words should be next to each other,” says the director. “But when you make a film that takes place in the Holocaust you must bring something new to the filmic discourse of roughly 500 or so feature films that have been made since 1945 and today.”

To that end The World Will Tremble, which is the result of ten years of research, much of it at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, is the first movie to reveal Podchlebnik and Weiner’s remarkable story. Perhaps it was inevitable that the Holocaust would figure in Geller’s filmography, which began with the 2008 short Roads about a traumatised former Israeli soldier who buys drugs from an Israeli Arab boy. It won a place in The Guinness Book of Records for the most awards won by a student film.

The 43-year-old is from a generation who remembers when Holocaust survivors were much more visible than they are now. Raised in New Jersey and Tel Aviv, Geller remembers survivors visiting his schools, or if he walked down his Tel Aviv street to the local market he might see someone with a number on his arm. Yet the story about how the first Holocaust testimony came about was completely unknown to him. “When I first learnt about it I was thinking, ‘How has this not been told before? There must at least be a book.’ But there was none.”

Charlie MacGechan and Neumark Jones[Missing Credit]

The first half of the film is a tough watch, as it should be. Chelmno pioneered the first use of gas as a method of mass murder on an industrial scale. Out of the 320,000 Jews sent there, Podchlebnik and Weiner were two of only four who survived. Gas chambers were not yet in use so Jews were packed into modified vans with a carefully engineered inlet built into the back door through which the vehicle’s exhaust fumes were fed as the vehicle beetled through the Polish countryside.

Yet without ever allowing the viewer to forget the depravity and sadism of the Nazis, the film embraces another tradition of cinema, that of the escape movie. Solomon and Michael (who are played by British Jewish actors Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Neumark Jones) even use a motorcycle – somewhat like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape – in their attempt to reach the rabbi, played by Anton Lesser, at nearby town Grabow.

It was important that the horrors were 100 per cent accurate. Projects that fictionalise are fodder for Holocaust distorters or deniers

“It was important that the horrors were 100 per cent accurate,” says Geller. “When people from the Holocaust educational community saw the film, some of them asked if I made anything up. I did not: not the bottles on the heads [where German guards force prisoners to hold bottles for target practice], not how the Nazis pulled out young Jewish women from the transports to keep in their villa before sending them to their death, not the fact that anyone surviving the gassings inside the van would be shot; not that musicians were forced to play music while prisoners danced for the SS.”

Geller takes a dim view of works about the Holocaust where historical accuracy has not been a priority, such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. “Projects that fictionalise the horrors of the camps are fodder for Holocaust distorters or deniers,” he says, “because when they see a scene in a film which the creators openly say didn’t happen, they say, ‘Well if that didn’t happen then maybe the six million didn’t.’”

Neumark Jones and Jackson-Cohen[Missing Credit]

Truth is at a premium like never before, says the director. “Anybody can say something on social media and it is portrayed as true.

“The eradication of truth is so prevalent, the story of the escape from the first Nazi death camp and the creation of the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust is more important than ever.” Geller resisted pressure from some in the film industry to glamourise or distort his film’s narrative. “When I was looking for financing I had opportunities to make the film for a lot more money and with bigger names but which I felt were not right for the film,” he says. Others wanted Solomon and Michael to be seen killing Nazis with their bare hands a la Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. “These were literally some of the conversations I had,” says Geller. The responsibility he felt to the people depicted in his film extended to the surviving members of their families, including Michael’s son Yaakov.

“I had a lot of conversations with him after I tracked him down. He was so grateful that finally somebody was telling his father’s story. I would ask him what kind of person Michael was, things that I couldn’t find in my research. I wanted him to meet Jeremy who plays his father but two weeks before he was supposed to visit us on location he passed away. It took almost 80 years from the end of the Holocaust to tell his father’s story. I only wished we had done it sooner so he could have been there.”

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The World Will Tremble is released on March 14

The JC hosts an exclusive screening of the film followed by a Q&A on March 4: go.thejc.com/theworldwilltremble