Eleven years ago, filmmaker Lior Geller’s aunt died, and Geller flew to London to help with funeral arrangements.
As a child, Geller’s Aunt Rebecca had lived in Bukovina, now an area in northern Romania, but had been sent away to hide with other children before her parents were deported ahead of the Nazi invasion of World War II. Miraculously, the family all survived the near-extermination of the region’s Jews and reunited after the war.
For Geller, Rebecca’s eventual death in 2013 was a personal turning point. “I remember thinking that the last Holocaust-survivor relative I had just passed away, and no one even knew her story,” he said. “That’s why I started researching.”
Geller embarked on a long, circuitous journey to learn what he could about his aunt’s wartime experience – a quest that ultimately led him to uncover the untold story of two Jewish prisoners who escaped the first known Nazi death camp and brought eyewitness accounts of the horrors being committed there in Chelmno, Poland, to the world’s attention. He has dramatized their escape in his new feature film, “The World Will Tremble,” which opens theatrically in many U.S. cities Friday before expanding to a worldwide release and on-demand streaming.
In the Los Angeles area, the film will play a limited run beginning March 14 at Laemmle’s Town Center in Encino and the Lumiere in Beverly Hills.
Even before he began combing through the available Holocaust data in Israel, Poland, Washington. D.C. and elsewhere – all of which he did in person because not much of the information was online at the time – Geller already considered himself fairly knowledgeable about that ugly chapter in history. He claims to have seen nearly every feature film ever made about the Holocaust, none of which included anything about the escape of Solomon Wiener and Michael Podchlebnik from the Chelmno camp and the information they brought to the world.
As a filmmaker, he says, their story cried out to him as great movie material. When he could find nothing, he started searching for a book to adapt and still came up empty.
“So I got in touch with a contact at Yad Vashem, and she’s the one who told me, ‘You’re gonna have to write this through archival research, not regular research.’
“Investigative screenwriting, as I call it. And that’s what had to be done.”
Geller, now 43, is an Israeli-American writer/director who’d launched his career years earlier, when his 2007 graduate short film at Tel Aviv University, “Roads,” screened at more than 75 film festivals worldwide and won 23 festival awards, the most ever for a student short. (He’s actually got a Guinness world record for this.) It also earned an Academy Award nomination.
Its success brought Geller back to the U.S. for contact with agents. “I didn’t even know what an agent was,” he said, “but they told me, ‘Get on a plane and come here and take some meetings.’”
Geller scheduled a two-month visit to Los Angeles and was living out of a hotel near LAX when he sold a pitch that led to more and more work. He decided to stay.
He was doing a lot of unscripted television, some documentary work, and an action-thriller for Lionsgate starring Jean-Claude Van Damme that he wrote and directed. And for years, when he had time between assignments, researching and writing “The World Will Tremble” was a passion project he kept returning to.
Then COVID happened. “I was about to actually get on a plane to Europe to shoot a series that I sold, and then that got shut down and I kind of took it as a blessing,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Now I’m here, I have time, and I’m gonna go back to this project.’ And that’s when I finished the screenplay.”
Geller scouted locations in Bulgaria and eventually re-connected over Zoom with producer Arthur Landon, with whom he’d been working on another project. “I was fascinated by this incredible untold, true story that reflected both hope in the darkest hours and a truly miraculous feat of pure determination,” Landon says now.
Landon and his partners had already established a small film budget at their London-based production company, Lorton Entertainment, and they decided to jump on board.
“Something that was clearly evident was the level of Lior’s planning,” Landon says. “He’d been working on putting this production together for years, and while it wasn’t oven-ready, the practicalities were certainly well prepped. That can really instill confidence in both producers and financiers.”
Together they decided to cast British actors of Jewish heritage to play the Polish prisoners with speaking roles. For the lead escapee they cast Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who works steadily in England including in the BBC’s Agatha Christie adaptation, “Towards Zero,” streaming on BritBox in April. Jackson-Cohen says “Tremble’s” subject matter made the feeling on set “horrific” on the film’s first shot, but there was such a supportive atmosphere, the cast and crew immediately formed a deep, unspoken bond of trust.
“I think it’s a credit to Lior and to Arthur, our producer, that they made this kind of incredibly safe environment for us,” he says.
The Nazi SS roles were arguably even harder to play, especially because Geller and Landon wanted Germans for those parts. David Kross, who won praise for playing the Kate Winslet character’s young lover in “The Reader,” says his role as Commandant Herbert Lange in “Tremble” “has probably been the most emotionally challenging role I’ve had so far.”
He and Geller discussed Lange’s use of alcohol to cope with the atrocities he’s committing, and we see the character drinking during one sequence. The actor himself used no such crutch. “I remember coming back to the hotel after shooting those horrendous scenes and how I just couldn’t stop crying,” he says.
Michael Epp (currently in “The Brutalist”) faced similar difficulties playing the cruel SS Polizeimeister Willi Lenz. “As macabre as it sounds, my way of finding this character was to manipulate my body and mind to not think about that weight,” Epp said. “I actually tried to bring a lightness to it and let my character’s words and actions simply speak for themselves.”
The film benefits from Erez Koskas’ score, which delicately reflects the story’s emotional depth and heightens its suspense. Credited as an executive producer on the film, Koskas spent a month with the crew in Bulgaria, partly crafting the music while on location. He and Geller have been friends since they formed a progressive rock band together as teenagers in Israel, and they’ve collaborated many times since then. As the grandson of a woman who once crawled through sewage pipes to escape Auschwitz, Koskas says this project was particularly dear to his heart.
Geller sets “Tremble’s” grim, opening scenes at the Chelmno camp and quickly sheds light on the early use of poison gas as a way to murder dozens of victims at a time. The film then shifts to a longshot life-or-death escape sequence and a suspenseful chase before the two escaped prisoners, Wiener and Podchlebnik, are able to get their story to the Jewish village of Grabow, where the local rabbi has connections to an underground resistance movement.
“It’s incredible to imagine,” Geller says. “This was a village that was probably the closest Jewish village to the death camp and yet, even there, they had no idea of what was going on.”
Producer Landon gives Geller tremendous credit for conducting years of research to fully realize this story. “When I think of how complex this production was and how many people worked miracles to make it happen, it is one I will take to my grave with pride in the knowledge that we brought a story about one of the greatest physical and mental achievements to life,” Landon said. “A story that most likely never would have been told.
“That would have been the final tragedy.”
“The World Will Tremble” is now playing in select theaters.
