‘The World Will Tremble’ Review: A Holocaust Story of Resistance

Among the many films centered on the Holocaust, the harshest tend to be those set inside the concentration camps themselves. The World Will Tremble is, at least in part, one of those. Chronologically speaking, it may even be the first of its kind, since it unfolds at a time when the Nazis had only just begun exterminating Jews in what would soon be known as the Final Solution. It tells the story of a small group of prisoners who attempted to escape in order to alert the world to what was really happening there.

At a “labor camp” in Chełmno, a group of young Jewish inmates dig mass graves to bury the dead while secretly plotting an escape. It’s far from easy: they are watched from all sides. But they also know that staying means certain death—they’ve already buried hundreds of people in those pits, including family members. As the film shows a new transport arriving at the camp, it lays out the mechanics of the process: the prisoners are told to leave their belongings behind, that they’ll be showered to eliminate potential diseases, then sent on to Dresden, and that they should write letters to their relatives explaining the move. The members of the group know that’s a lie, but they can’t tell the newly arrived. And shortly afterward, the film makes that painfully clear—from a distance.

The World Will Tremble follows an ever-shrinking group of would-be rebels, including Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Neumark Jones), who, in the most devastating moment of the film’s first half, is forced to bury his own wife and children—something director Lior Geller chooses not to show. As they endure a series of horrors—witnessing the madness and whims of Nazi soldiers who even use them for target practice—Solomon, Michael, and the others begin to piece together an escape plan with the goal of letting the outside world know what’s taking place inside the camp. The film’s second half then tracks, step by step, the dramatic ordeal of that escape.

The World Will Tremble is a solid, restrained film—perhaps a bit too tidy and academic for the story it’s telling—with dialogue that veers between TV-ready and overtly melodramatic. While this is a subgenre that can sustain a certain degree of dramatic emphasis, there are moments when the score seems to be striving to supply an emotional charge the images can’t quite generate on their own. The horror is there, certainly, but always at a safe remove. That discretion—commendable in that it avoids reveling in atrocity—can also keep viewers from fully engaging with the characters’ personal tragedies.

In the brief, one-minute coda, however, those personal dramas finally emerge through a short piece of documentary footage that evokes more pain, emotion, and empathy than much of what precedes it. Geller directs with a degree of elegance, relying frequently on long takes, and stages a particularly moving sequence in which two of the escapees ride a motorcycle in silence. They don’t speak. Nothing is shown. There’s no underlining. Just their faces, buffeted by the wind, as they flee—not necessarily in the hope of saving themselves, but of making sure the world learns what is happening there.