On June 26, 1942, the BBC made a historical radio broadcast informing the world about the coordinated effort by the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe (the “Final Solution” had officially been set in motion just five months prior during the Wannsee Conference). This shocking report on what would come to be known as the Holocaust was based on firsthand eyewitness accounts provided by Solomon Wiener and Michael (pronounced Mee-Cha-El) Podchlebnik, two escapees from Chełmno, one of the first extermination camps set up in Poland. The notable feature of this particular death factory was its use of gas vans, a forerunner to the larger, more impersonal gas chambers built at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Despite the fact that it would take another three years for these heinous killing centers to finally be shut down — upon which time 11 million innocents (six million of them Jews) had already been slaughtered — Wiener and Podchlebnik’s testimony marked the start of “Never forget" and “Never again.” In other words, the mindful recording of Holocaust survival stories for future generations (think Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California). Even if those two men didn’t make it out of Europe alive, the unspeakable acts carried out in the name of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich would still live on in infamy, reminding humanity what blind hatred and xenophobia could lead to if a society wasn’t careful.

It’s an incredible true story of perseverance in the face of insurmountable odds and yet, seldom has been written on the subject, as Israeli/American writer-director Lior Geller (We Die Young) discovered when he set out to depict Wiener and Podchlebnik’s harrowing existence at Chełmno and subsequent escape in his powerful Holocaust drama: The World Will Tremble (now playing in select theaters nationwide via Vertical).

“Even Holocaust educators don’t know a lot about Chełmno,” says the filmmaker, whose paternal aunt was a child survivor of the World War II genocide. “As the first Nazi death camp, there’s not a lot of information out there about it. In fact, when I started researching it, there weren’t even books that I could get my hands on. There still isn’t any book dedicated to the escape of Solomon and Michael, and the first eyewitness testimony. So I felt like this story was one that deserved to be told, despite the many great films out there about the Holocaust.”

Geller continues: “There have been some really great films about the Holocaust — from 1945 until now and some are obvious masterpieces. I think when you make a film about the Holocaust, or it takes place [during]

the Holocaust, you have to bring something new to the conversation. I felt like this particular story was something new."

While Michael did survive the war and move to Israel prior to his death in 1985, it took some serious detective work on Geller’s part to track down the man’s surviving relatives. “Nobody had their information. Nobody could find them," remembers the director. “[Even] Yad Vashem [a world famous Holocaust museum in Jerusalem] didn’t know what happened to the kids. It took me a long time until I finally located them because they had changed their last names from ‘Podchlebnik’ to ‘Peled.’ I finally got in touch with Yakov Peled, Michael oldest son, and we had a lot of conversations. He really helped me a lot to get to know his father and give me information that I couldn’t find in the research.”

Yakov unfortunately passed away just before he was due to visit the Bulgaria-based production, but his input proved invaluable to the actor portraying his father, Jeremy Neumark Jones (Belgravia). “I perceived him to be quite optimistic, quite robust, gentle, very kind, sensitive,” says the actor, whose own family left Germany and resettled in the United Kingdom a year before Hitler seized power in 1933.

Though his forebears were spared from the worst of the Holocaust, they still had a front-row seat to the gradual rise of the Nazis and their virulent strain of anti-Semitism. “At the end of [my audition] tape, I decided to put a personal message to Lior saying how much his script had affected me and sharing a little bit of my own family’s story."

That was the same reaction for Jones’ fellow co-star, Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Invisible Man), who plays the role of Solomon. Sadly, Michael’s fellow escapee was eventually recaptured and killed at the Belzec camp.

“I read it and thought it was so unbelievably moving,” notes Jackson-Cohen, whose paternal side of the family consists of French émigrés from the North African Jewish community. “I was just so taken aback that all of this stuff was true, that every single part of the script is true, that all of those things happened, and that these were two real people were subjected to this.”

He continues: “I don’t think any of us can [truly understand] the depths of what these people were subjected to. But then, as an actor, you have to try and find the closest you can. We all felt this real responsibility of making sure that this story was told as honestly as we possibly could … You always feel this real pressure and Lior was incredible, supporting us through that process. It’s quite a scary thing, especially the circumstances in which these people lived. You feel this real weight to try and honor it as honestly as you can. A lot of it is, ‘I hope I don’t let him down. I don't want to let him down, because this story deserves all the truth that we can give to it.’"

Geller’s determination to be as truthful to the real-world story as he could meant turning down prospective producers, several of whom wanted more action and wish fulfillment (à la Inglourious Basterds and Hunters) added to the screenplay. “They were saying, ‘How about Solomon and Michael escape at minute five and it’s a classic escape movie, and they kill Nazis with their bare hands in the middle of Act II? Respectfully, I would say, ‘Thank you very much, this is not the movie I’m making.”

To that end, the majority of the movie’s first hour is dedicated to the hopelessness of daily life at Chełmno, where Wiener, Podchlebnik, and several others work as Sonderkommando, inmates forced to carry out the unthinkable job of lying to and disposing of their fellow Jews — including family members. Any slip-up or act of insubordination, no matter how small, results in immediate death from the barbarous SS members running the camp. Cohen-Jackson describes the atmosphere on set in terms of cognitive dissonance. He points to fellow cast member Michael Epp who would be in-character as a sadistic Nazi guard one minute and cracking jokes the next. “It was a bizarre thing, because you would oscillate between terror and huge, hysterical laughter," Jackson-Cohen says.

“Our German actors, David Kross [the camp commandant] and Michael Epp, who play two terrible human beings, are actually two of the nicest guys you’d ever meet. The nicest SS officers you could ever imagine,” echoes Geller. They're so different from their characters.”

That strange dissonance also comes across in the story itself during scenes where inmates cling to their religious background in a godless place by reciting prayers over their meager rations of bread (the Hamotzi) and fallen comrades (Mourner’s Kaddish). “These people are subjected to this absolute horror, but I think there’s something incredibly touching about [the fact] that they are still holding on to their faith in these moments,” says Jackson-Cohen. “I think that’s a beautiful element Lior brought into the film.”

“The Mourner’s Kaddish has a very specific place in my family, and it’s something that means a lot to us,” adds Jones. “It’s a prayer that means to all Jewish people, [of course], but it really meant a lot to me, and that sense of the only time you can express yourself and can give voice to those kinds of things is away from the view of everyone that could have a problem with it. It was just an amazing feeling. And because of the scenes being constructed in that way, it always really brought to life the truth of the moment for us all.”

Another director might have shied away from such minutiae or worse, be completely ignorant of them. Geller, however, knew to paint in these little details in order to “be as realistic and as truthful to these people and to their experience as possible," notes the director.

To help set the film apart from other Holocaust dramas, Geller took the Son of Saul and Zone of Interest approach by leaving much of the concentration camp atrocities to the imagination of the viewer. “We tried to go with keeping the camera mostly on Jeremy, Oliver, and the other actors,” he explains. “The the horrors of the camp and the violence take place mostly off-camera or in the background; out of focus, using sound to to accompany the images. I felt like that’s something I hadn’t really seen.”

Indeed, that minimal, utilitarian approach drives home the material that much harder. When a shipment of Jews is gassed, for instance, the muffled banging and screams from the victims is more than enough. Not only does it make one’s blood run cold with the thought of what must be going on inside the back of the van, but it also emphasizes the detached, industrialized way in which the Nazis sought to murder those they considered less-than. “Somebody asked me in one of the interviews, ‘I’m sure you had a lot of footage that ended up on the cutting room floor,’" Geller reveals. “Like footage of inside the gas truck when the Jews are put inside … and I told them, ‘No, we didn’t have any of that.’ We only shot what I felt we were going to use.”

The second half of the film, meanwhile is dedicated to Solomon and Michael’s daring escape, as well as their perilous journey across the Polish countryside — evading soldiers of the Wermacht, informants eager to turn in Jews for reward money, and the ghetto-based Judenrat — to find a rabbi (Game of Thrones’ Anton Lesser) who can pass their accounts of Chełmno to the underground resistance. “What’s interesting with the character of Solomon, is he goes from completely and utterly powerless to finding the strength which he never thought was possible," says Jackson-Cohen. “Even though he’s so terrified and isn’t sure of himself, he’s forcing himself to overcome and to find the courage. It’s an important thing for everyone to remember, because we all get scared and find it hard sometimes to feel courage. But you gotta do it anyway.”

The World Will Tremble, which held its world premiere at the Miami Jewish Film Festival in January of this year, couldn’t be opening at more appropriate time when anti-Jewish rhetoric and crimes have grown exponentially all over the world — not to mention the fact that the last-living Holocaust survivors are starting to die out.

“I feel this film is very timely, but at the same time, I’m sorry that it so long — 80 years since the end of the Holocaust — to make it,” Geller concludes. “I only wish we had made it sooner..."

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