Only a tragically small handful of prisoners ever escaped from the notorious Nazi extermination camps around Auschwitz, but a few brave souls succeeded against the odds, alerting the wider world to the horrors within. Slovakian actor turned director Peter Bebjak tells a local story with universal resonance in The Auschwitz Report, recreating the courageous real-life exploits of Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg) and Alfred Wetlzer, Slovakian Jews who broke out of the Polish concentration camp complex in April 1944. The duo’s exacting eyewitness account of industrial-scale mass murder was widely circulated and eventually republished by the US War Refugee Board. It became one of the first major documents accepted by the Allies as solid evidence of Nazi genocide, and is credited with helping to save at least 100,000 lives.
Bebjak is clearly mindful that Holocaust films carry a special weight of historical responsibility, particularity those based on true stories, and rightly tend to follow a respectful set of aesthetic rules: muted colours, sombre music, no hint of levity. That said, he and his team succeed in making a potentially harrowing period piece play like a punchy contemporary thriller, with imaginative use of dynamic cinematography, sense-jarring flashbacks and recurring nightmare motifs. Selected as Slovakia’s official Oscar contender last year, The Auschwitz Report pays gripping homage to real-life heroism without ever feeling like a dry history lesson. Picked up for US release by the Samuel Goldwyn Company, it is currently on limited theatrical release Stateside, and heading for more European openings over the next few months.
Hardened to the hellish survivalist regime inside Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba (Peter Ondreji?ka) and Alfred Wetlzer (Noel Czuczor) are compiling secret records of the numbers killed and the lay-out of the camps, stowing their risky notes beneath piles of naked corpses. Their perilous escape plan, which entails hiding out under a stack of construction timber for several days, guarantees instant execution if they are caught. Then again, they reason, staying behind means certain death anyway. Bebjak spends the first hour of plot on the duo’s dramatic exit and its grisly consequences inside the camp, where fellow inmates pay a heavy price in the form of vengeful beatings, starvation, torture and random slaughter at the hands of sadistic German officer Lausmann (Florian Panzner). These grisly scenes are not easy to watch, but fairly restrained compared to some recent Holocaust dramas, notably Hungarian Oscar-winner Son of Saul (2015).
As Vrba and Wetlzer flee through a harshly beautiful winter landscape, cinematographer Martin Žiaran’s immersive, kinetic camerawork serves a powerfully dramatic purpose, shooting at steeply raked angles and even upside down to mirror the dislocated, exhausted, sense-scrambled viewpoints of the protagonists. The colour palette is drained and desaturataed, with ample use of tight depth of field to sharpen focus differentials, lending an extra layer of sweaty intimacy to close-ups.
More bold camerawork shapes the climactic set-piece scene, played in English, which finally brings Vrba and Wetlzer face to face with a British Red Cross official, played in a stand-out extended cameo by veteran Scottish actor John Hannah (Sliding Doors, Four Weddings and a Funeral). Initially dismissive towards mounting evidence of mass slaughter in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps, Hannah’s stuffy bureaucrat is forced to face some harsh truths during a flinty exchange with the two fugitives. Žiaran’s camera captures this self-contained chamber drama in a single elegant shot, slowly zooming in on Hannah’s haunted face as the world-historical scale of the Holocaust begins to dawn on him.
The Auschwitz Report works better as chase thriller than psychological drama. Bebjak reveals almost nothing about the inner lives of his protagonists. Dialogue often feels flatly functional, especially the stilted English-language section. The film ends on coolly angry note, protesting that Allied reaction to the Vrba-Wetzler report came too little and too late, ignoring the duo’s plea that bombers “blast this place into oblivion.” Still, their revelations helped save around 120,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation, and probably more.
In a movingly emotional postscript, it is immensely gratifying to learn from the end credits that both men survived long after WWII ended, with Wetlzer dying in 1988 and Vrba in 2006. In the eternal battle between superhuman courage and inhuman cruelty, this feels like a small victory of sorts. But Bebjak does not let his audiences off the hook with a happy ending. One of his final bravura shots features Vrba taking a long hard stare straight to camera, implicitly asking viewers an uncomfortable question: what would you have done?
Director: Peter Bebjak
Screenplay: Jozef Pasteka, Tomas Bombik, Peter Bebjak, adapted from the book Escape From Hell by Alfred Wetzler
Cast: Noel Czuczor, Peter Ondrejicka, John Hannah, Jan Nedbal, Florian Panzner, Christoph Bach, Wojciech Mecwaldowski
Producers: Rasto Sestak, Peter Bebjak
Cinematography: Martin Ziaran
Editing: Marek Krá?ovský
Production designer: Petr Synek
Costume designer: Katarina Strbova Bielikova
Music: Mario Schneider
Production companies: DNA Production (Slovakia), Evolution Films (Poland), Ostlicht Filmproduktion (Germany), Radio and Television of Slovakia (Slovakia), Czech Television (Czech Republic)
In Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, English
93 minutes
