The Last Days (1998)

Here is a film that offers further proof of the madness of the Final Solution. At a time when the Nazis might have tried propping up their sagging fortunes on the war front, they devoted precious resources toward deporting and exterminating Hungarian Jews. Thus, the five people whose stories are told here, all of them now living in the United States (and one, Tom Lantos, a long-serving Congressman), begin with disbelief. They had heard of the atrocities visited by the Nazis on other countries in Europe, but they never thought it would happen to them. Once the German army invaded in March 1944 that disbelief quickly turned to terror ("You were a hunted animal 24 hours a day," Lantos says) and finally to sorrow over so many lives lost and so much culture destroyed. The film is more than just storytelling and vintage clips of Jews being rounded up; each survivor revisits the old country with a child or grandchildren, to walk the old neighborhoods and among the ruins of the death camps where four of them were imprisoned. (Lantos remained in Budapest for the duration of the war.) Among the most painful memories stirred up by these trips is how neighbors turned so quickly against their Jewish friends. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide