'Emotional challenge' for both Jewish, German actors in new film 'World Will Tremble'

(JNS) — There have been many powerful films about the Holocaust, so if one opts to create a new one, one must “bring something new to the conversation,” according to the Israeli-American director Lior Geller.

Geller told JNS that the new film “The World Will Tremble,” which he wrote and directed, “is a story that wasn’t told before, and I think it’s important to make it as accurate as possible.”

The film centers on Michael Podchlebnik and Solomon Weiner, who fled the Nazi death camp Chelmno in German-occupied western Poland on Jan. 19, 1942. The movie is based on the true story of the survival of the two men and their evasion of the Nazis.

Many are unaware that Chelmo was operational the day before the infamous Wannsee Conference, held in the Berlin suburb on Jan. 20, 1942, in which Nazi plan for European Jewry — the “Final Solution” — was laid out in detail, according to Geller.

“The first transports to the gas vans of Chelmno were a day after Pearl Harbor, before there even were gas chambers at Auschwitz,” he said.

Early in World War II and the Holocaust, Nazis lined Jews up and shot them, with their bodies either falling or being thrown into ditches throughout Europe. But the process was slow and messy, and munitions were expensive. For mass murder to work as they planned, the Nazis needed a more efficient manner of killing.

Geller said that before they used Zyklon B to gas Jews to death, German Nazis retrofitted an Opel Blitz truck with a grate to seal it off. A pipe connected the exhaust fumes to go directly into the truck to create a killing machine.

There was no way to get around having a violent film given the subject, but Geller told JNS that he approached the subject judiciously.

“We experience what the main characters experience,” he said. “I didn’t want to show gratuitous violence.”

Filming was an “emotional challenge” for the actors.

“Both the German actors and the Jewish actors,” Geller said. “To know that people actually went through that was challenging for us and them. Usually, a film set is very loud. As soon as you say ‘cut,’ people are moving lights and grips and rushing. There were days I’d say ‘cut,’ and it was quiet.”

Research for the film took 10 years, including at Yad Vashem in Israel and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, according to Geller. Filming only took 18 days and was conducted in Bulgaria, he said.

Galler is the grandson of survivors, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Solomon), Jeremy Neumark Jones (Michael) and Charlie MacGechan (Wolf) are Jewish. The latter learned while working on the film that he had relatives that went through the Holocaust and connected with family members he hadn’t previously known.

“When I made that movie, I thought no one outside Israel would get it or respond to it,” Geller told JNS. “I was shocked when it won awards in Montpellier, and other places. It taught me there are universal truths that people can relate to, and I try to find them in stories I tell.”

“I have small children,” he added. “When I was a kid, there were Holocaust survivors. You would know them. They would be at your synagogue, or at the market. They’d talk at school. It wasn’t a rare occurrence.”

The future approaches when there won’t be more Holocaust survivors to offer testimony.

“In a world in which the erasure of truth is so prevalent there is an urgency of a film where people were bearing witness to what was happening,” he said.

“We could spend three or four minutes talking about every single Holocaust survivor and it would take us longer from the end of the Holocaust till now,” he told JNS. “To me, it’s not only about the 6 million. It’s about individual stories. Each and every one of those victims is a whole world. Everyone deserves their story to be told.”