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Steven Spielberg has grasped something profound about the righteous use of film. Long after ET and Jaws have blended into the stacks of oldies at Blockbuster, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation—which Spielberg himself conceived while working on Schindler's List—will leave an enduring record to stand with such classics as Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the Shoah Foundation will endow posterity with a record that no book can match. It will have preserved for the ages the personal testimonies of survivors and perpetrators of the ultimate failure of Western civilization. Drawing on this unparalleled archive, The Last Days chronicles the lives of five Hungarian Jews. Directed by James Moll, it is one film in a projected series of documentaries from the Shoah Foundation.
A great failure of traditional histories is their overwhelming focus on generals, despots, and tyrants. We meet the Borgias, the popes, the monarchs, and all the other larger-than-life players, but we do not meet ordinary people like ourselves. We do not encounter everyday citizens, driven into Faustian bargains that will alter not only history, but themselves. It is this deficit that The Last Days powerfully corrects.
In one of the most exquisitely agonizing moments ever filmed, Auchwitz survivor Renee Firestone sits in a charmingly appointed Bavarian den. Beside her is a soft-spoken, kindly looking gentleman who calls to mind the late Francis Schaeffer. This is a wretched moment for Firestone; the gentleman is Dr. Hans Munch, who conducted medical experiments at Auchwitz under the direction of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. Firestone's sister, Klara, was selected for experimentation at Auchwitz because of her smooth skin. The Nazi doctors cut her up like a dog, and when she was of no further use as a specimen, she was dispatched, perhaps with a lethal injection, perhaps to the gas chambers. Or maybe she died from the experiments. This is what Renee Firestone hopes to find out.
In an interview before his meeting with Firestone, Dr. Munch explains that he was acquitted at the Nuremberg trials because he was not completely enthusiastic about the experiments. When Firestone, choking with humiliation, politely shows him the camp records, he peruses them like a physician scanning the charts of a personal patient. "Alles gut, alles gut," he pronounces with an impeccable bedside manner. When Firestone notes that after a short period of time her sister seems to have evaporated, he replies breezily, "Well, you were there, so you know. That was about the average length of time." Dr. Munch might be a travel agent discussing a vacation at Club Med. He cannot apologize or even acknowledge Firestone's grief. Outwardly, he acts as though the two of them have been inconvenienced by forces beyond their control.
In terms of sheer numbers of victims, the Nazis' Final Solution is not unique. Stalin killed more, as did Mao. The Hutus slaughtered a larger proportion of their own populace in a shorter time, as did the Khmer Rouge. The British successfully exterminated the Tasmanian race from the face of the earth in the last century; not one Tasmanian is left. Yet the Holocaust overshadows these events for its unmitigated premeditation. The Nazis were no frenzied, peasant mob. They arose from one of the most civilized of modern nations, the birthplace of the Reformation. They horrify us precisely because they were so much like us.
The Holocaust embodies what Roger Shattuck described in the January 1998 issue of the Atlantic Monthly as "radical evil," that is, "immoral behavior so pervasive in a person or society that scruples and constraints have been utterly abandoned … [a] form of evil, so extreme that it can no longer recognize its own atrocity."
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