History Through Movies essays

History Through Movies essays The movie The Last Days focuses on five Shoah survivors, each one of them telling their story to the camera. These five survivors are named Congressmen Tom Lantos, Alice Lok Cahara, Renee Firestone, Bill Basch and Irene Zisblatt. Each one of them came to America after the war creating families, professions and occupations, they narrate there past. The first person viewed is congressmen Tom Lantos, the 10- times elected Congressmen from California and the only holocaust survivor in Congress, he is the only Budapest of the group, the son of Patrician parents, both killed in camps. Tom Lantos came to the United States in 1947 on a Hillel Scholarship. Zisblatt escaped the gas chamber only because the room was so full that the door could not be shut without first removing her, Basch came face to face with a Nazis pistol, forced to leave a friend behind or to be killed himself. The witnesses were all teenagers then who grew up fast now narrating their Holocaust horrors. Many of them beli eve that they were kept alive to tell their story. The film focuses on the last years of the war when the Nazis shifted their emphasis from winning the war to diverting immense resources to the final Solution an attempt to annihilate all of European Jews. The horror began, on March 19,1944, Hitler by now mistrustful of his ally invaded the country. In Hungary the selection and deportation process was carried out in a mere twelve weeks. It is a documentary about the final days of millions of Jews, which is known as the Holocaust. Spielberg put together lots of film file footage about the Holocaust. It is a horrifying, troubling, but ultimately uplifting documentary that tells the story of the Holocaust in the words of Jewish Hungarian survivors. The film begins with the survivors each one of them telling their personal stories. These are five apparently strong and healthy older people, each one of them ...