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The World Will Tremble

I watched The World Will Tremble on Netflix, and I have to say, this is one of those movies that stays with you after the credits roll. It is not an easy movie to watch, but it is an important one. I would give it a high rating.

The movie tells the story of two Jewish prisoners, Solomon Wiener and Michael Podchlebnik, who escape from the Nazi extermination camp at Chełmno in occupied Poland during World War II. Their goal isn’t simply to survive. They want to get word to the outside world about what the Nazis are doing.

And what they witnessed was horrific.

At Chełmno, Jews were being murdered in specially equipped gas vans. Victims were told they were being transported for work, only to be packed into sealed trucks. The engine exhaust was then redirected into the compartment, killing the people inside. Prisoners were forced to remove the bodies and bury them in mass graves.

The movie portrays the horror through the eyes of the men forced to participate in this process. At one point, Podchlebnik discovers that his own wife and children are among those murdered. That moment becomes one of the emotional turning points of the film.

The two men eventually escape and make their way to the Grabów ghetto, where they meet Rabbi Schulman. In the movie, Schulman initially struggles to comprehend what they are telling him. He records their testimony and promises that the story will reach the outside world. The title comes from the idea that the world will tremble when it learns what is happening.

And this is where the movie takes some creative license.

The film presents the escapees’ journey to Rabbi Schulman and the transmission of their story to London as a relatively direct chain of events. It makes the rabbi a central figure in getting their testimony out and presents the BBC broadcast as the dramatic culmination of their escape.

The historical record is a little more complicated.

Szlama Ber Winer—called Solomon Wiener in the film—escaped Chełmno and eventually reached the Warsaw Ghetto. There, he gave a detailed account of what he had witnessed to Oneg Shabbat, the underground Jewish archive organized by historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Winer’s testimony became known as the Grojanowski Report, after the pseudonym he used, Jacob Grojanowski. It described the gas vans, the killing process, the removal of bodies and the mass graves.

That testimony, along with other information gathered by the Jewish underground, eventually made its way to the Polish government-in-exile in London. On June 26, 1942, the BBC broadcast information about the mass murder of Polish Jews, including information about Chełmno. So the movie is absolutely right about the significance of getting this information out—the actual route was simply more complicated than the movie makes it appear.

There is another important difference between the movie and what actually happened.

The film leaves you with the impression that both men ultimately met the same fate. They didn’t.

Szlama Ber Winer was eventually captured while searching for surviving family members and was murdered at the Bełżec extermination camp in April 1942. Michał Podchlebnik survived the war. He eventually made his way to Israel, remarried and later gave testimony about what he had experienced. He also testified in postwar proceedings involving the perpetrators of the Chełmno killings.

That difference doesn’t diminish the movie. If anything, I think knowing the actual history makes it more powerful.

What struck me most about The World Will Tremble is that these men weren’t simply trying to escape a death camp. They understood that escaping wasn’t enough. Someone had to tell the world what was happening.

And that’s what makes the story so difficult to process. The information did get out. The BBC broadcast it. The world was warned.

But the killing continued.

The film’s title therefore has a painful irony to it. The men believed that once the world knew what was happening, the world would tremble. And in one sense, it did. But not nearly enough to stop the machinery of murder.

The World Will Tremble isn’t a perfect movie, and it does take liberties in compressing and dramatizing the historical events. But the story at its center is real, the horrors it depicts are real, and the courage of the men who risked everything to tell the world is very real.

For me, that’s enough to make this a movie worth watching.

Highly recommended.