The End of the Millennium

The Last Chapter. To a generation once removed from the holocaust of European Jewry, The Last Chapter will be an illuminated manuscript of what once was and can never be again. To some of those whose memories are longer, it will be a film almost too bitter to bear.

Producers Benjamin and Lawrence Rothman have pointedly avoided the customary chamber-of-horrors approach in their documentary history of the Polish Jews. There are no closeups of bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves, no shots of the prisoners of Treblinka and Auschwitz. The narra tor, Theodore Bikel, never raises his voice a decibel above conversational level. Instead, with a rare collection of stills and film clips, the movie quietly tells the history of Jewish life in Poland, a history that took a millennium to evolve and four years to be obliterated.

Chapter shows the end first: the new Diaspora after Hitler's "final solution" scattered the remaining Jews to the U.S. and Israel. Then the film tours the ancient village of Kazimierz on the Vis tula, where Jews first settled in Poland. Though Poland gave them nothing but space-on land they could not own-the Jews returned the favor tenfold over the centuries.

They became productive citizens, weavers, blacksmiths, tailors, scholars, even soldiers who fought in segregated battalions for Polish independence against the Czar. In return, Poland alternately ignored them or persecuted them with murderous pogroms. Still, a year without a pogrom was considered a good one, and the good years were poetically simple and sweet. Chapter shows a cheder, a Hebrew school full of students so serious that they are almost comic, a scene from a Yiddish play, a 1912 home movie of an Orthodox wedding looking for all the world like a series of moving Chagall lithographs of children, bride, groom and wedding guests.

The film's contained bitterness rises in the last half hour, when the story of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising is told with vivid battleground photography. The ghetto was supposed to have been destroyed within a 24-hour period, in time for Hitler's birthday on April 20. Instead, its prisoners held out against the Germans for 42 days, without the support-perhaps air-dropped medical supplies-that, the filmmakers contend, the hard-pressed Allies could have given.

That more than 4,000,000 (the film's figure) Jews perished in Poland is only a statistic. By showing the history of all of them, and the personalities of a few of them, The Last Chapter gives the tragedy a face and brings it unforgettably home to stay.

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