Rating: 
Summary: Heartwrenching...
Review: I was fortunate enough to see this on the big screen when it was first released. It was an experience that I will never forget. I've seen many Holocaust films before, but nothing like this. It is certain to touch your soul in a way you can't anticipate. In the theater, when it ended, we were all frozen in our places. No one spoke. No one moved. Everyone cried. Simply an incredible film.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent enough footage
Review: I watch this film with the sound turned down, it's the only way to escape the incessant whine of narration and pathetic hatemongering zionist slime.
Defects aside, this film is a strong testament to the collective will of the German people to knuckle down amidst mounting defeats at allied hands (...) and see to the task at hand.
Most would view Hitler's stalwart attitude towards jewry in these last days as mere revenge for the defeat their global network of lies brough upon his flock. Those of us who are open enough to see past the hollywood glitter undoubtedly recognise the leaders undying will to serve his people and more importantly his nation.
He knew he was defeated yet he battled on where the fighting was needed most!
Disgustingly exaggerated death figures abound and as always the jews take all the glory, little to no mention at all of POW's, communists, slavs or even homosexuals who outnumbered even the outrageous supposed jewish deaths.
Take it with a pinch of salt, some good footage and a little factual info.
Make up your own minds people.
Rating:
Summary: Accurate and Necessary
Review: I watched this movie for the first time with my grandmother who is a native Hungarian and a concentration camp survivor. To be next to her and attempt to re-live the pain she went through is a truly difficult experience. We only know what we read in books or see on TV but she was there, she had similar experiences that were so accurately documented in this movie. This documentary is a work of justice, showing how the beautiful people that are interviewed have survived and thrived in their lives. This is not a fictitious story, the people who were involved were real and their experiences were real. God Bless them for having the courage to speak out and bless those who worked so hard in tmaking this movie.
Rating:
Summary: "OVERNIGHT, FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS WE GREW UP WITH TURNED ON US"
Review: In his opening remarks on camera, Steven Spielberg states this is the most important film he's made. Five aging Americans, formerly Hungarian Jews return to Hungary from which they escaped or were removed in the final days of the holocaust. Having since 1939 murdered millions of European, Polish, Russian, Balkan and Greek Jews the Nazis next turned on the Hungarians. A recurring theme is that the final days of the Hungarian holocaust made no military or political sense. By 1944, the Germans knew they would lose the war. Moreover, to commit resources to transporting and murdering these Hungarians sacrificed much needed resources. On top of this, the German Nazis gave up the opportunity to show their conquorers that they had not been an evil enemy. About one of every ten Hungarians was a fully assimilated Jew. Indeed, many of them didn't even know they were of Jewish ancestry. Never mind. The Nazis researched the birth and death records and in a short six weeks rounded them up and shipped most of them to the Auschwitz death camp. It is against this backdrop that the five main characters in Spielberg's brilliant documentary film tell their story. Tom Lantos, prominent six times elected U.S. Congressional Representative from California retraces his adolescent flight from the Nazis in Hungary for his several grandchildren. He takes them back to the very places of his boyhood escape while the Nazis hunted him. But the other victims have even more poignant stories. In one scene , a woman who had medical studies done on her and her sister (who died there) in Auschwitz brings with her the death camp records to confront the very same now aged German Nazi doctor who experimented on them. When she asks what sorts of experiments he had done on them, the old Nazi very matter of factly says the experiments were quite successful. Asked why her sister died, he answers that SHE should certainly know that for the time they were there it was quite usual for children to die. Another woman returns to the town of her childhood and visits her family's house. Reliving the day she was removed by the Nazis, her worst trauma was experiencing that overnight friendly neighbors with whom she had grown up suddenly turned on her family. This she said was worse than the trauma of the death camp itself. She was devastated by the realization that seemingly caring friends with whom one shares everything in life can so suddenly join your enemy's side. This film explores the extremes of human experiences from betrayal to hope, and the human spirit to survive amid impossible odds. It is a film all should see to know what humans are capable of during their darkest hours. After wringing out the audience, this documentary leaves the viewer with a hopeful message that for those who survive life can be made into something worthwhile in the succeeding generations. At the end, I had to tearfully agree with Spielberg that this is his most important film.
Rating:
Summary: The Last Days, Yesterday, and Tomorrow?
Review: Please view this film. This is an incredibly important film, filled with factual, and very educational information about the sufferings created by Nazi Germany. This film helps us to remember.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible Documentary!
Review: The Last Days is a very powerful piece of work. I've read numerous books on the subject of the holocaust and have seen several other documentaries; however, this is the one to own. Most segments are of witnesses describing their experiences about the holocaust; these witnesses may be camp survivors, allied liberators and even a Nazi doctor. The most chilling part is when one of the survivors meets with this Nazi doctor and confronts him about the death of her sister who was experimented on in a clinic under his supervision in Auschwitz. In my high school, books on the holocaust were required reading; this documentary should also be a requirement. To see what happened to the victims at these times, and to see how it affects their lives today, is very, very moving.
Rating:
Summary: there is a glaring typo in the amazon.com review
Review: the word 'superkommando' should be 'sonderkommando' : sonderkommando were the jews who were forced to work the ovens and dispose of the dead.
Rating:
Summary: may we never forget
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful and touching documentary
Review: This documentary is really great. You will feel with the persons who lived through the horrors of nazi policies. Have a box of kleenex handy. See the documentary and learn why we must all respect eachother regardless of religion, color etc.
Rating:
Summary: Real People and the Real Horror of the Holocaust
Review: 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.
|
