Product Details

• Actors: Dario Gabbai, Martin Basch, Bill Basch, Hans Frank (III), Robert Ley
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Original recording reissued, NTSC
• Language: English, German, Hungarian
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Universal Studios
• VHS Release Date: November 5, 2002
• Run Time: 87 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00007ELJW
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #387,538 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

In the last year of World War II, German defeat was inevitable. Yet rather than reinforcing his troops and focusing his efforts on battle, Hitler chose to renew his campaign to eliminate the Jews of Europe. Hungary, which had remained mostly untouched during the war, found her Jews being rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps where they were systematically and brutally killed during these last days. This documentary, directed by James Moll and produced through the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, whose goal is to document the memories of those who lived through the Holocaust, records the stories of five Hungarian Jews who managed to survive.

The five survivors, all now living in the United States, movingly tell how they made it and recount the tragedies they witnessed: Tom Lantos, a Congressman from California, whose 17 grandchildren are a gift from his two daughters to try to make up for the families Lantos and his wife lost; Alice Lok Cahana, an artist who uses her painting to testify to what she saw and to grieve for the meaningless death of her sister Edith; Bill Basch, who while working for the resistance escaped from Hungarian police by joining a group of Jews that were, unknowingly, being led to Buchenwald; Renee Firestone, an educator at Simon Wiesenthal Center's Educational Outreach Program, whose touching connection to the past is discovered in the simple gift of a bathing suit given to her by her father; and Irene Zisblatt, a grandmother who smuggled out, at tremendous risk, a few precious diamonds in order to buy bread when there was no more food to be had. Other interviewees include American liberators, a superkommando, and a Nazi doctor who performed experiments on camp inmates.

While the stories are tragic and watching this documentary is a tearful experience, the final message is one of hope, as the five people return to Hungary and the camps with their families to confront their pasts and say their prayers. While the occasionally graphic footage will disturb, this Oscar-winning film is one that should be shared with family as a way of educating and reminding us, "Never again." --Jenny Brown

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful film, everyone should see this one, January 19, 2004

By 

Joe Sherry (Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Days (DVD)

A film by James Moll

Winner of the 1998 Academy Award for Best Documentary

I do not feel that I have the words to adequately describe this film and my reaction to it. I have seen "Schindler's List", it is a powerful, haunting film. While it is based on a real event of the Shoah, it is still a fictional film. There are actors playing parts and despite the brutality we see in the movie, everyone goes home at the end of the day. What makes "The Last Days" so much more powerful is that the five primary interviewees are survivors of the Holocaust. They are telling their stories of their lives and their experiences of Hitler's Final Solution. There is actual video footage, and photographs from the time, and it is still shocking to hear and to see, and I would suggest that it remains necessary to hear and to see.

This is the story of five Jews from Hungary. They tell of their experiences before, during, and after the war. They were all in various camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen. Their stories are incredible, and since the stories are being told by the men and women who experienced the Holocaust, they are all the more powerful. We learn how they were rounded up and put into the train cars, what they thought, why they didn't actively resist, and what happened to the rest of their families. We also get to see them each go back for the first time to the concentration camps they were held in. They are with their children, and are revealing little details, mostly painful, as they remember them. One man, as he walks through the gates says that even after all these years, the memories are just as fresh as when he was a prisoner.

I don't feel that my description does this film justice. It is a beautiful, powerful, and ultimately necessary movie. Despite the fact that we may have heard various stories of the Holocaust over the years, we still need to hear these stories because pretty soon there will be nobody left alive who lived through it, and these stories will be all that is left. These are important stories, and "The Last Days" does an exceptional job at telling these five stories.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars may we never forget, November 28, 2004

By 

Alejandra Vernon "artist & illustrator" (Long Beach, California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Last Days (DVD)

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.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If Only These LAST DAYS Were Also the Last Time, January 8, 2000

By 

J. Michael Click (Fort Worth, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Days (DVD)

A picture is worth a thousand words. And so a *moving* picture, clipping along at the rate of 24 frames per second, has the potential to be priceless. THE LAST DAYS proves that, and does so powerfully and with uncommon eloquence. Focusing on the Nazi campaign against Hungarian Jews during the last few months of World War II, the film interweaves recent interviews with survivors of this atrocity with vintage documentary film footage and photographs. The result is a very potent and poignant lesson that speaks of our common humanity (and potential for inhumanity), the mob mentality, individuality, and how those human dynamics come into play during the course of history. I found at the end of the film that my shirt collar was damp from tears that I had not realized I was shedding, and that the storytellers leave a lasting impression --- a week later, their words and faces are still sharply etched in my mind, and I suspect I will always remember them.

The film-to-DVD transfer is flawless, and there are powerful extra features to explore: a still archive, deleted sequences, the theatrical trailer, and much, much more. I would honestly recommend that you prepare to spend some time "processing" what you learn and experience while watching this disc, and that adults be sensitive to the impact that this material may have on less mature viewers. Truly Hitler's "Final Solution" is the stuff of unimaginable horror, and this most worthy Oscar-winner pulls no punches in exposing a very real nightmare to the light of day.