When the world refused to tremble

“The World Will Tremble” is the name of a new motion picture.

Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened. It didn’t.

“The World Will Tremble” is about the first escape from Chelmno, in Poland. It was the earliest Nazi death camp; prisoners were herded into gas vans, hoses were connected from the trail pipe to the truck, and people were asphyxiated, 50 or 60 of them at a time.

Eventually, of course, the Nazis became far more efficient. Between 1941 and 1945 more than 300,000 Jews were sent to Chelmno, and only four survived the war. Two of them made it out and tried to warn the world about what was happening. But the world didn’t listen to their eyewitness testimony, so it didn’t have an opportunity to tremble. Their report was largely ignored by the press. It sounded too terrible to be true. The U.S. Office of War Information refused to publish it, believing that the two men made it up.

Those men were Michael Podchlebnik and Solomon Wiener. They worked as grave diggers. Actually, they were more pit diggers, excavating large holes in the ground into which bodies were dumped and covered over. As Podchlebnik notes in the video — a scene recreated in the film — while he was digging, he discovered his wife and child among the dead. He begged the Nazis to kill him too, but they refused, because they needed able-bodied men to work.

Wiener died before the war ended, but Podchlebnik survived, emigrated to Israel, and testified for Claude Lanzmann’s epic film, “Shoah.”

Sadly, scenes like this make it easier to understand why the powers-that-be refused to believe the extent of the atrocities the Nazis were inflicting on Jews. I asked the film’s Israeli-American director Lior Geller if he had to hold back on what he included in “The World Will Tremble.”

“Yes, I did,” he told me in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles, where he now lives. “This is a feature film, but it is based on reality, a true story. There is some dramatization in the film, of course. But the details of the camp were real. It was important for me not to create horrors. Like the scene where you see them doing target practice, aiming at bottles on prisoners’ heads. That happened. The moment where they take a young Jewish female prisoner out of the transports and hold her in camp for a couple of days. That happened, too.

“It was important for me that those details were true. But I did hold back, because there were a lot of horrors I discovered in my research that honestly were too horrific to put in the film. It would be too graphic.”

Geller started work on the project about a dozen years ago, “when a family member who was a Holocaust survivor passed away,” he said. “That sent me on a course of Holocaust research. Just trying to research my own family history in the Shoah.

“Through that history, I came across the story of Chelmno and the story of the two prisoners who escaped. I started researching it more and writing the script.”

The film seems especially important now, given the events of October 7, 2023. “October 7 happened while we were editing the film, and to be honest, my first reaction was that this film was no longer relevant,” Geller said. “Everything was seen. Everything was online. I felt the horrors of October 7 made my film lose relevance, especially for a Jewish audience.

“But very quickly that feeling subsided and went away because I saw the world’s reaction to October 7. I’ll say it like this: I felt like we are now living in a world where the eradication of truth is so prevalent that a film about a Nazi death camp and the first two people to provide eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust makes the movie timely.”

Geller’s father was born in Europe after the war, moved to Israel, and met his mother, a sabra. Geller also was born in Israel, but his traditionally observant family moved to New Jersey when he was young, and he spent his grade school years in Highland Park as a student at the Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva. His mother missed Israel, though, so the family returned. Lior went to high school there and then studied at the Tel Aviv University Steve Tisch School of Film and Television.

His career started off with a bang when his short film “Roads” set a Guinness Book of Records record for most awards — 19 at last count, plus 19 additional film festival award nominations — earned by a student in that format.

“Roads” was 22 minutes long and financed by a $4,000 grant. It was a crime drama about an Arab-Israeli boy, a drug runner for a street gang outside Tel Aviv, who dreams of escaping the neighborhood.

“It was a particularly Israeli story,” Geller said. “I was shocked by how well it was received outside Israel. I needed to make a graduate film as my final project in my last year. I liked the idea and I worked on it for quite a while, but I never imagined it would do so well or that people would see it. So its first success was pretty surprising to me

“Then it started winning awards internationally, and they started inviting me to all these festivals. I hadn’t traveled a lot ’til then and I went to all these places I’d never been to — Beijing, Brazil. Germany.”

The rollercoaster ride hasn’t been as intense since then, but he’s kept busy with theatrical films and television. “I’ve got a TV series based on the story of the Maccabees, a sword-and-sandal period piece that was sold and is about to begin production,” he said. “I was actually getting on a plane to Europe to shoot the series on March 13, 2020.

“That was the day, if you remember, where everything was shut down because of covid, and that kept me here. But that became a blessing because that enabled me to make this film.”

After a brief theatrical release, “The World Will Tremble” will go to video on demand on April 8.