Is The World Will Tremble based on a true story? Explained

The World Will Tremble is a Holocaust drama film directed by Lior Geller, who has also penned its screenplay. The film is produced by Black Sheep Films, Radiancy Pictures, Lorton Entertainment, and UFO Films, and is distributed by Vertical. It premiered at the Miami Jewish Film Festival on January 16, 2025.

The film tells the true story of two Holocaust survivors, Michael Podchlebnik and Szlama Ber Winer, who escaped from the Chełmno extermination camp during World War II. Their heroic escape from the Nazi occupation became a link for the rest of the world to understand the horrors of Holocaust and the urgency to stop it.

The film was released theatrically in the United States on March 14, 2025. It stars Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Neumark Jones in the lead roles, while the supporting cast includes Anton Lesser, David Kross, and Michael Fox among several others.

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The World Will Tremble is based on the true story of two Holocaust survivors

As mentioned above, The World Will Tremble is based on the true story of two Holocaust survivors who escaped from the brutal Chełmno extermination camp. The two survivors were; Michael Podchlebnik, played by Jeremy Neumark Jones, and Szlama Ber Winer, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen.

Here's the official synopsis of The World Will Tremble:

"The incredible, untold true story of how a group of prisoners attempt a seemingly impossible escape from the first Nazi death camp in order to provide the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust."

The story of Michael Podchlebnik and Szlama Ber Winer

Michael Podchlebnik and Szlama Ber Winer were two of the four fortunate ones among 320,000 Jewish prisoners who survived the Chełmno extermination camp. It was one of the six camps made solely for the purpose of mass murder and ethnic cleansing. The survivors escaped on January 19, 1942, by slipping out of a lorry that was going towards the Rzuchów forest subcamp.

The odds of surviving the hunt were low, but somehow Podchlebnik and Winer managed it. Through days of struggles and hiding from the SS officers, the survivors reached the Warsaw Ghetto in the General Government part of occupied Poland.

There they described the harrowing conditions of the concentration camps, the forced labor, the constant beating and torture by the Nazi officers, and the mass killings through the gas chamber. Szlama Ber Winer had himself witnessed his family dying in the gas chamber. Podchlebnik became a key witness in the Chełmno Trials in 1945 where the SS officers were prosecuted.

The Emmy-nominated filmmaker, Lior Geller, has brought forward the long-buried story of resilience, bravery, brutality, and the will to survive through The World Will Tremble. Talking about the film with Slug Mag, the director expressed his disbelief over the lack of recognition of the incredible story of the two survivors. He said:

"I was just amazed that this story hadn’t been told before. Not just in film, but in television documentaries, or even in books. I was actually looking for a book to adapt, but I couldn’t find it."

He also expressed the importance of bringing such a story forward.

"The Holocaust was so vast, with so many horrors, that some of the earliest testimonies were dismissed as exaggerations. Even the Allies had difficulty believing the scope of the genocide at first. These men risked everything to tell the world, but history didn’t give them the recognition they deserved."

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Stay tuned for more news and updates on The World Will Tremble and other such upcoming films and TV series.