Horrifying all the same

Rating: Null/10 (20 April 2016)

Maybe I am wrong but I think I have read somewhere that Holocaust survivors who still exist, say that of all the films made about the Holocaust till now this is the one that better and more authentically reproduces the real atmosphere of a nazi extermination camp. In fact to begin with, the shooting technique puts us the viewers inside the camp among its inmates because it uses almost all the time the close up image mainly focused on the protagonist's face while he walks and wanders among the prisoners and meanwhile we hear the noises off made by the terrified people penned up in the gas chamber, their desperate cries and loud weeping, the bangs and clangs on the chamber doors and the yelling orders of the German officers who utter the cry of "schneller" (faster) all the time. The protagonist is a Sonderkommando (an inmate who is treated less ruthlessly because he is employed by the Germans in collaborating with then in the task of herding the other prisoners although a few months later Sonderkommandos could be killed themselves). His main purpose is trying to give a proper Jewish religious funeral to a young boy that survived to the gas inhalation to be afterwards smothered to death by a German officer. For that he hides the corpse and tries to find a rabbi to perform the funeral in a secret way of course. All the time we can feel the brutal and intensely dramatic atmosphere of the camp. Despite not showing much the usual particularly awful images of other Holocaust movies, it is horrifying all the same.