The Last Days

Winner of the 1998 Academy Award for Best Documentary this wrenching initial feature from the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which was launched by Steven Spielberg to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors, views the Holocaust through the eyes of five Hungarian survivors, whose country was invaded in the last year of World War II by an imminently defeated Germany. As one interviewee notes, Hitler was more concerned with exterminating the Jews than he was with winning the war. The witnesses include Alice Lok Cahana, Renee Firestone, Irene Zisblatt, Bill Basch and Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to Congress. The film chronicles not only their horrific and heroic stories, but also their emotional homecoming, and in one case, a confrontation with a man who conducted medical experiments at Auschwitz. Also included are interviews with American servicemen who liberated the death camps and discovered "the walking dead." As we enter a new century and members of what Tom Brokaw has popularly coined "the Greatest Generation" pass on, it is vital that these stories be preserved. Not just because they expose the lies of Holocaust deniers, but because they put a human face on an unspeakable and unfathomable chapter in history. More important--excuse the cliché--they are a testament to the indomitable human spirit. Highly recommended. (K. Lee Benson)