'The Last Days': Haunting Images By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 9, 1999

James Moll directs this documentary on the Holocaust in "The Last Days." (October Films) Director: James Moll Cast: Bill Basch; Alice Lok Cahana; Renee Firestone; Dario Gabbai; Tom Lantos; Irene Zisblatt Running Time: 1 hour, 29 minutes Contains disturbing footage and testimony from the Holocaust

"The Last Days" amounts to a sampling of the testimonies of Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, which is in the process of videotaping the reminiscences of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust.

Consequently, there's a flat, perfunctory air about this film. But if its method is flat and lifeless – this may be the first formulaic Holocaust documentary ever made – the content is transcendentally affecting.

The suffering screams at you, thanks to the emotional stories from five Hungarian survivors and the bottomless sadness in their eyes. It stays hideously alive in the grim, war-period footage of those living wrecks: the Jews, gypsies and other ethnic prisoners who lie mutely in bunks, their eyes barely registering life; the mass graves of starved bodies in gruesome piles of death.

The stories recount the terror, indignity, desperation and tragedy suffered by Holocaust victims. Rep. Thomas Paul Lantos, America's only Holocaust-surviving member of Congress, tells of his life during the war. He was 16 when the Nazis rolled into Hungary. He escaped capture twice from a labor camp and worked for the Hungarian underground in Budapest, facing the possibility of discovery and execution every day.

We hear about parents, siblings, children, separated from one another, never to see each other again. "I said to myself, 'I will never let him go,'‚" recalls one survivor, as she – only a teenager then – gripped the hand of her 2-year-old brother." She lost him.

Renee Firestone, another survivor, packed her favorite bathing suit when she heard the sound of Nazi boots at her door; that suit was her own private metaphor for her hopes, youth and the life that was about to be stolen forever. She clung onto it as she could not to her own family.

We hear also from Irene Zisblatt whose mother sewed diamonds into the hem of Irene's dress when they were captured. When Nazis forced Irene to strip, she swallowed the diamonds. Throughout the war, she kept those precious stones by using her digestive cycle to keep them hidden. The diamonds hang around her neck today.

The movie derives its power from these storytellers and their harrowing, painful accounts. But there are information gaps everywhere, lost in the film's flat style, its de rigeur approach to the subject.

A Nazi doctor at the Auschwitz clinic was acquitted at Nuremberg, he says, because he saved lives by retaining patients to perform harmless tests on them. But we don't get his full story; and an encounter between him and one of the survivors is notable for its absence of incident. How do you mess up a scene like that?

Director James Moll is surely not disrespectful toward the survivors, but there is an almost photo-op mentality to the film. In many cases, the camera seems to be waiting like a predator for tears to cascade, particularly when Moll records the reactions of the survivors as they return to their home towns, or the camps for the first time since the war.

"Why did I survive?" asks survivor Bill Basch, as he looks at Buchenwald for the first time since the end of the war. "Why did God spare me?"

In human terms, it's one of many telling, searing moments in the movie. But you have to almost willfully ignore the archival agenda of the movie, as you mentally reach toward him to feel the depth of his agony.