Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36534 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-11-30
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 87 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
In the last year of World War II, German defeat was inevitable. Yet rather than reinforcing his troops and focusing his efforts on battle, Hitler chose to renew his campaign to eliminate the Jews of Europe. Hungary, which had remained mostly untouched during the war, found her Jews being rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps where they were systematically and brutally killed during these last days. This documentary, directed by James Moll and produced through the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, whose goal is to document the memories of those who lived through the Holocaust, records the stories of five Hungarian Jews who managed to survive.

The five survivors, all now living in the United States, movingly tell how they made it and recount the tragedies they witnessed: Tom Lantos, a Congressman from California, whose 17 grandchildren are a gift from his two daughters to try to make up for the families Lantos and his wife lost; Alice Lok Cahana, an artist who uses her painting to testify to what she saw and to grieve for the meaningless death of her sister Edith; Bill Basch, who while working for the resistance escaped from Hungarian police by joining a group of Jews that were, unknowingly, being led to Buchenwald; Renee Firestone, an educator at Simon Wiesenthal Center's Educational Outreach Program, whose touching connection to the past is discovered in the simple gift of a bathing suit given to her by her father; and Irene Zisblatt, a grandmother who smuggled out, at tremendous risk, a few precious diamonds in order to buy bread when there was no more food to be had. Other interviewees include American liberators, a superkommando, and a Nazi doctor who performed experiments on camp inmates.

While the stories are tragic and watching this documentary is a tearful experience, the final message is one of hope, as the five people return to Hungary and the camps with their families to confront their pasts and say their prayers. While the occasionally graphic footage will disturb, this Oscar-winning film is one that should be shared with family as a way of educating and reminding us, "Never again." --Jenny Brown

Customer Reviews

A powerful film, everyone should see this one
A film by James Moll

Winner of the 1998 Academy Award for Best Documentary

I do not feel that I have the words to adequately describe this film and my reaction to it. I have seen "Schindler's List", it is a powerful, haunting film. While it is based on a real event of the Shoah, it is still a fictional film. There are actors playing parts and despite the brutality we see in the movie, everyone goes home at the end of the day. What makes "The Last Days" so much more powerful is that the five primary interviewees are survivors of the Holocaust. They are telling their stories of their lives and their experiences of Hitler's Final Solution. There is actual video footage, and photographs from the time, and it is still shocking to hear and to see, and I would suggest that it remains necessary to hear and to see.

This is the story of five Jews from Hungary. They tell of their experiences before, during, and after the war. They were all in various camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen. Their stories are incredible, and since the stories are being told by the men and women who experienced the Holocaust, they are all the more powerful. We learn how they were rounded up and put into the train cars, what they thought, why they didn't actively resist, and what happened to the rest of their families. We also get to see them each go back for the first time to the concentration camps they were held in. They are with their children, and are revealing little details, mostly painful, as they remember them. One man, as he walks through the gates says that even after all these years, the memories are just as fresh as when he was a prisoner.

I don't feel that my description does this film justice. It is a beautiful, powerful, and ultimately necessary movie. Despite the fact that we may have heard various stories of the Holocaust over the years, we still need to hear these stories because pretty soon there will be nobody left alive who lived through it, and these stories will be all that is left. These are important stories, and "The Last Days" does an exceptional job at telling these five stories.

Real People and the Real Horror of the Holocaust
This documentary of five Hungarian survivors of the holocaust is not a comfortable movie to watch. We cannot make believe that it is an re-enactment by actors; we are not distanced from it by the general news clips. Instead, this tightly edited film brings five individual stories of real people to the screen with a scorching reality. In the last six months of WWII, Hitler concentrated his resources in deporting 440,000 Hungarian Jews even after he knew the war was lost. The five people in the documentary, then teenagers, were caught up in this brutal chapter of history, and each one tells his or her story against a backdrop of rare footage of films that were taken by the Nazis. Now in their late 60s and 70s, each one of these survivors, surrounded by loving families, visit the scene of the devastation, and tell their stories.

Steven Spielberg is the executive producer of this small gem of a film, a memorial to the horrible truth, and I am sure it is his name which brings this film to movie theaters, where I first saw this film. The theater complex on had only two showings -- at noon and at 4:55 p.m. I cannot help but wonder why it was deemed unfit for Saturday night viewing, because every seat was taken in the tiny theater. I cried, and heard the sobbing of the people around me. It was that kind of film. The human beings on the screen were so real. Their stories so true. Their lives so shattered. And then rebuilt. A living testimony to the survival of the human spirit. It's a testimony also of what can be done with film. How a history can be preserved. How snapshots of real life can be recorded. As I left the theater, my eyes swollen from crying, my soul sick from what I have just seen, there were lines of people waiting to get into see the latest romantic comedy, the newest thriller, the silliest cartoons. My heart was still beating wildly as I gulped the fresh air outside the theater and walked slowly home, the horror and the history still touching my raw nerves. I cannot help but think about the other sad stories in history that cry out to be memorialized in this way. And the fact that without a big name like Spielberg, or the proper funding, these stories will never be told. But why do we need to know? What good does it do? How can it change our lives to relive over and over again the many atrocities of humankind? The answer lives in the perspective it gives us as we go about our lives. We are only a part of the continuum of history. It is luck or karma or just the random winds of life that give us our lives of abundance. And when I pause, and think about it seriously, I can only give thanks for my wonderful life.

may we never forget
This award winning documentary should be viewed often and by everyone, because those who don't know history well are condemned to repeat it; the voices that survived to tell of the horror of the Holocaust also speak of the naivete during the rise of Hitler, and California Congressman Tom Lantos, one of the survivors interviewed for this film, states this fact eloquently.
The documentary focuses on five Hungarian-born Jews, and the harrowing stories of their lives, as well as others, like Hans Munch, a doctor who took part in the Nazi experiments conducted in Auschwitz, and three members of the U.S. Army, who entered Dachau to liberate it, and were faced with a living hell.

The survivors return to Auschwitz, to see the place of their suffering, to say Kaddish for their relatives who were murdered, and to visit the their birthplace in Hungary; one town, which until the early '40s had a thriving Jewish community, has now not a trace left...what little Hitler left of it, the Soviets finished, in their zeal to eradicate everything and everyone with a Jewish heritage.

Interspersed with the interviews is wrenching archive footage of the Holocaust, a vision of pure evil that mankind can sink to, and can do so again if we dull our awareness to those of hateful ideologies, who seek to terrorize and destroy.
Executive Producer Steven Spielberg calls this film his most important work, and I agree with him. Directed with great sensitivity by James Moll, and with an affecting score by Hans Zimmer, it is a gripping testament to those who must not be forgotten. Total running time is 87 minutes.