They escaped from Chelmno

The World Will Tremble, a film from director Lior Geller,  focuses on a 1942 escape from Chelmno, the first death camp created by the German army in Poland. Two of the escapees are credited with bringing first-hand accounts of the mass murder of Jews to the outside world. Prior to the escape, we meet Jewish men who've been pressed into horrible labors at Chelmno: digging mass graves and hauling bodies out of trucks after gassing. Cruelty abides. A German officer assures new victims they'll be treated better than they were in crowded ghettos. Instead, all of them are murdered. After introducing life in the camp, the movie follows two escapees (Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Neumark Jones) through Polish forests as they attempt to elude German pursuit. A late-picture scene brings the men to a village, not yet liquidated, where the local rabbi has difficulty accepting their account. I wish that The World will Tremble had felt more developed, but Geller succeeds in calling attention to a story that's not well known. You may want to think of what's depicted at Chelmno as an Auschwitz prequel. You'll see Michal Podchlebnik, one of the real escapees, in an epilogue. For the record, Podchlebnik, who died in 1985 the age of 78, appeared in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. He also testified in 1961 at the trail of Adolf Eichmann.