New film shows how escapees from 1st Nazi death camp revealed Final Solution to the world
Screening in NY to mark Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, director Lior Geller’s ‘The World Will Tremble’ tells true story of daring revelation of plan to exterminate world Jewry
Reporter at The Times of Israel
Inside a German military truck, soldiers guard a group of Jewish forced laborers en route to a grim task: The burial of the latest Jews gassed to death by the Nazis in a village in occupied Poland known as Chelmno.
Two Jews in the truck — Solomon Wiener and Michael Podchlebnik, both hailing from nearby villages — are planning to escape. They aim to let the world know about the unimaginable horrors occurring at this secret Nazi death camp, the first on a list that will also include such places as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor. Their fellow captives are wary: An escape would jeopardize the lives of the Jews who remain. Unexpectedly, one of the previously reluctant Jews asks a guard to share his cigarette. Then another requests a puff. Solomon and Michael recognize this for what it is: a distraction. They cut through the side of the truck and jump out.
This pivotal scene propels Solomon and Michael’s journey, which unfolds across “The World Will Tremble,” a new film based on the duo’s daring true story, from Israeli director Lior Geller. The film chronicles a little-known yet momentous Holocaust narrative.
Chelmno, Geller told The Times of Israel, was “the very first Nazi extermination camp, death camp.” As such, the escape portrayed in the film was “the first escape, the first eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust.”
In the film, Solomon and Michael escape on January 19, 1942. They give testimony to a well-connected rabbi about what the Third Reich has sought to keep secret — a plan to annihilate European Jewry. Six months later, this testimony had been disseminated to the UK, with media reports then circulating it around the world — including in a BBC broadcast played during the closing credits.
On Wednesday, Geller’s film was screened at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in New York City, a day ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah.
“I’m honored to screen it on such a day,” he said.
The director has a diverse resume. “Roads,” a short film he made in college, set a Guinness world record for numbers of awards received by a student film. “The Heart of Jenin” told the real-life story of a Palestinian man in the West Bank whose son was fatally shot by Israeli police who mistook a toy gun for a real one. The grieving father decided to donate his son’s organs to needy families in Israel. “We Die Young” is a feature film that stars martial-arts movie veteran Jean-Claude Van Damme.
In the current climate, as antisemitism worldwide reaches levels not seen since World War II, Geller sees his latest film as absolutely necessary.
“The first escape, the first eyewitness testimony, more than anything, [shows] the importance of bearing witness, which Solomon and Michael did,” Geller said. “That makes it more timely now, more than ever, in an age when antisemitism is so prevalent.”
Geller came to this project unexpectedly. He was researching his own family’s Holocaust narrative. In doing so, he came across the story of the escape from Chelmno, and wondered why it was not better-known. He began doing archival research in Poland, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem. Dr. Na’ama Shik, a scholar at Yad Vashem, proved a valuable source of information and served as a historical consultant for the film.
The film was shot in Bulgaria, and actors Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Neumark Jones were cast as Solomon and Michael, respectively. Jackson-Cohen’s credits include the 2020 film production of “The Invisible Man,” while Neumark Jones’s resume includes the spy drama “Kleo.”
“Obviously, in a film, a lot of dramatization has to be done,” Geller said. However, he added, “The operations of the camp itself, the horrors of the camp — those all actually happened, I did not make them up.”
Fleeing as bullets fly
When we meet Solomon and Michael, they are digging a ditch with fellow laborers in a forest. Back at Chelmno, a Nazi officer deceptively promises a group of Jews that they will be transported to a labor camp in Leipzig. They are encouraged to write letters to loved ones saying that they have arrived safely in the German city. They are also asked to remove their clothes and belongings before taking a pre-trip shower. Instead, they are brought into a van, the doors are locked, and the gas turned on. They scream as they realize their fate. Solomon, Michael and the rest of the laborers follow the “gas van” on its grim journey into the forest, where Michael makes a tragic discovery.
“Michael, I found, opened the gas truck and saw people from his village — ultimately his wife and two young children, five and seven, a boy and a girl,” Geller said. “It’s portrayed in the film.”
The film also shows the cruel Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners — including the fate of a young woman whom the guards consider attractive enough to keep alive for a few more nights — and of the laborers, whom the authorities can kill on the spot for any reason. The laborers endure grueling work, little food, and the daily burial of slaughtered Jews. Most of the laborers oppose trying to escape because of the revenge that the guards will presumably wreak on them.
Yet Solomon and Michael pull it off, fleeing through the forest as bullets fly past them. Pursued by Nazis and guard dogs, they make it to a river and swim through the ice-cold currents to the other side. A series of twists and turns unfold. They have been advised not to trust local Poles, yet a woman on a farm turns this advice on its head. Later in the war, Michael found refuge with a Polish farmer who treated him poorly but saved his life nonetheless, according to Geller.
“There were some Poles that would not help Jewish escapees and some who did,” Geller said, noting that any Pole who aided a Jewish escapee risked punishment by death. “It goes to show the extreme courage and selflessness of the Poles who did end up helping. It’s why we have the Righteous among the Nations in Israel.”
Too terrible to believe
Solomon and Michael reach their intended destination — the town of Grabów — only after a hair-raising encounter with a German convoy. When they elude the Judenrat and finally find refuge among fellow persecuted Jews, there is an unexpected obstacle: The local rabbi, a man named Schulman, cannot believe their account. He protests that he knows the Germans and that they are incapable of such atrocities. (Geller said this reflected a similar belief among German-speaking Jews early in the war.) In response, the duo show him a list of names already slain by the Nazis at the camp. Now convinced, the rabbi promises to spread the unbelievable news. In predicting how the international public will respond, he utters the line used in the film’s title.
According to Geller, the rabbi sent multiple letters about the Chelmno escapees’ testimony. The closing credits state that Schulman stayed with his congregants as they were deported to Chelmno and killed, and that Solomon was recaptured and died at Belzec.
Michael did make it out of occupied Europe. He immigrated to present-day Israel, where he remarried and started a family. He also testified against his former guards. Footage of later-in-life Michael is shown during the closing credits.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia webpage on Chelmo puts the camp’s death toll at 172,000 or higher between 1941 and 1944, with seven survivors. The names include Mordechai Podchlebnik and “a mysterious ‘Szlamek’ [Solomon], whose actual identity has never been fully established … Though he did not survive, Szlamek found refuge in the Warsaw ghetto and told of his experiences.”
Geller said that before Solomon was captured a second and final time, he conveyed his testimony to a group of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto: The clandestine archivists of Oneg Shabbat. This group, headed by Emanuel Ringelblum and Rokhl Auerbach, was secretly documenting prewar Eastern European Jewish life as well as Nazi war crimes against the Jews.
The testimony of Solomon and Michael was eventually smuggled out of Poland to the UK. In addition to the BBC, the Daily Telegraph also reported on it, as did The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. A rare US media outlet that put it on page one was a Black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier.
“Reports did get out,” Geller said. “Did it achieve the effect that Solomon, Michael, the rabbi, Rokhl Auerbach [and others] had hoped? No. But at least it was out. At least people knew.”
And, he added, “if the word had not gotten out so early, perhaps acts of resistance [in camps and ghettos] would not have happened. Before this report went out, when word first got out, the Jews really had no idea.”
The Times of Israel Community.