The Last Days
''The Last Days'' is a 1998 documentary film directed by James Moll and produced by June Beallor and Kenneth Lipper; Steven Spielberg, in his role as founder of the Shoah Foundation, was one of the film's executive producers. The film tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust (also known as the Shoah), focusing on the last year of World War II, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and began mass deportations of Jews in the country to concentration and extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz. It depicts on the horrors of life in the camps, but also stresses the optimism and perseverance of the survivors. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 71st Academy Awards. It was remastered and re-released on Netflix on May 19, 2021. Content The film includes archival footage, photographs, and documents, as well as new interviews with Holocaust survivors Bill Basch, Irene Zisblatt, Renée Firestone, Alice Lok Cahana, Tom Lantos, Rando ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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James Moll
James Moll is an American director and producer of film documentaries and television documentaries. His documentary work has earned him an Academy Award, two Emmys, and a Grammy. Moll's production company, Allentown Productions Inc., has been based at Universal Studios since 1994, primarily producing non-fiction film and television projects. Moll also serves on the executive committee of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and serves as chair of the documentary award for the Directors Guild of America. Early life and education Moll was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania and attended and graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1987. Career Film and television Moll began his professional career as an intern reading scripts for film producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who later hired him as an assistant to French writer-director Francis Veber for Veber's American remake of ''"Les Fugitifs"'', ''Three Fugitives''. In 1996, Moll's firs ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Auschwitz Concentration Camp
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (''Stammlager'') in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question. After Germany sparked World War II by invading Poland in September 1939, the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp. The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles for whom the camp was initially established. The bulk of inmates were Polish for the first two years. In May 1940, German criminals brought to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dario Gabbai
David Dario Gabbai (September 2, 1922 – March 25, 2020) was a Greek Sephardi Jew and Holocaust survivor, notable for his role as a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He was deported to the camp in March 1944 and put to work in one of the crematoria at Birkenau, where he was forced to assist in burning the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews that were deported to the camp during the spring and summer of that year. Gabbai remained at Auschwitz until its evacuation in January 1945. He was liberated from Ebensee concentration camp in Austria by the United States Army, and spoke publicly about what he witnessed and experienced during the Holocaust. He was the last of the known survivors of the Sonderkommando. Deportation Gabbai was born in Thessaloniki to a Greek mother and an Italian father and was educated in Italian schools in Greece. At the age of 21 or 22 years old, Gabbai and his entire family were detained by the Nazis on March 24, 1944, and on April 1 t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Randolph Braham
Randolph Lewis Braham (December 20, 1922 – November 25, 2018) was an American historian and political scientist, born in Romania, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A specialist in comparative politics and the Holocaust, he was a founding board member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, D.C., and founded The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center in 1979. Braham's career was spent teaching comparative politics and Soviet studies at The City College of New York, where he chaired the political science department. He was the author or editor of over 60 books, authored or co-authored chapters in 50 others, and published a large number of scholarly articles. The vast majority of his published work deals with the Holocaust in Hungary. He became best known for his two-volume work ''The Politics of Genoci ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tom Lantos
Thomas Peter Lantos (born Tamás Péter Lantos; February 1, 1928 – February 11, 2008) was a Holocaust survivor and American politician who served as a U.S. representative from California from 1981 until his death in 2008. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state's 11th congressional district until 1993 and from then the 12th congressional district, which both included the northern two-thirds of San Mateo County and a portion of the southwestern part of San Francisco after redistricting. Lantos, who served as Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in his last term, announced in early January 2008 that he would not run for reelection because of cancer of the esophagus. He died before finishing his term. A Hungarian Jew, Lantos was the only Holocaust survivor to have served in the United States Congress; he survived the genocide with help from Raoul Wallenberg. In speaking before the House of Representatives after his death, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Alice Lok Cahana
Alice Lok Cahana (February 7, 1929 – November 28, 2017) was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. Lok Cahana was a teenage inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben and Bergen-Belsen camps: her most well-known works are her writings and abstract paintings about the Holocaust. Her work celebrates Judaism and those murdered in the Holocaust by transforming the horror of their deaths into a testament to their lives. As she told Barbara Rose in the ''From Ashes to the Rainbow'' catalog interview, "I started to paint only about the Holocaust as a tribute and memorial to those who did not return, and I am still not finished." Early life Alice Lok Cahana was born in Sárvár, Hungary in 1929. She first learned to draw in a Jewish high school (Jewish students were forbidden to attend public schools at the time). In 1944 she and her entire family were transported to Auschwitz as part of the massive deportation of Hungarian Jews. While interning at Guben concentration camp, Lok Cahana made ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Renée Firestone
Renée Firestone (née Weinfeld; born April 13, 1924) is a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and educator, who became known for her fashion designs in the 1960s after she immigrated to the United States. Early life Born Renée Weinfeld in Uzhhorod, Czechoslovakia on April 13, 1924, she lived in an area annexed into Hungary in 1938. She was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 along with her family when she was 19. She lost her mother and a sister there, then survived a death march before she was liberated in 1945. Her father also survived, but died of tuberculosis soon after. She married a man in Prague that had survived a forced labor camp in Hungary and then Mauthausen concentration camp. They immigrated to the United States in 1948 and settled in Los Angeles, California. Career Firestone became a successful fashion designer and Holocaust educator. She first collaborated with fashion designer Rudi Gernreich in the 1950s, before starting her own clothing line ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Irene Zisblatt
Irene Zisblatt (née Zegelstein; born 28 December 1929) is a Carpathian Mountains-born American Holocaust survivor. She was an inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She appeared in the 1998 documentary ''The Last Days'' and published her autobiography ''The Fifth Diamond'' in 2008. Biography Irene Zegelstein was born on 28 December 1929, in the resort town of Polyana, in what is now Zakarpattia Oblast in Ukraine, in a house with no electricity. Her father was a co-owner of a spa, and her mother was a housewife. Around 1939, at the age of nine, she was expelled from school, since Jewish people were forbidden to leave their houses after six in the evening or before eight in the morning. On the second night of Passover, 8 April 1944, she and her family were sent to the ghetto of Munkács, which, according to Zisblatt, consisted of a former brick factory surrounded by a fence. All houses were already full, so her family built a small tent from the tablecloths they h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Netflix
Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a film and television series library through distribution deals as well as its own productions, known as Netflix Originals. As of September 2022, Netflix had 222 million subscribers worldwide, including 73.3 million in the United States and Canada; 73.0 million in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 39.6 million in Latin America and 34.8 million in the Asia-Pacific region. It is available worldwide aside from Mainland China, Syria, North Korea, and Russia. Netflix has played a prominent role in independent film distribution, and it is a member of the Motion Picture Association (MPA). Netflix can be accessed via web browsers or via application software installed on smart TVs, set-top boxes connected to televisions, tablet computers, smartph ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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71st Academy Awards
The 71st Academy Awards ceremony, organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best of 1998 in film and took place on March 21, 1999, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonly referred to as Oscars) in 24 categories. The ceremony, televised in the United States by ABC, was produced by Gil Cates and directed by Louis J. Horvitz. Actress Whoopi Goldberg hosted the show for the third time. She first hosted the 66th ceremony held in 1994 and had last hosted the 68th ceremony in 1996. Nearly a month earlier in a ceremony held at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California on February 27, the Academy Awards for Technical Achievement were presented by host Anne Heche. '' Shakespeare in Love'' won seven awards, including Best Picture. Other winners included ''Saving Private Ryan'' with five awards, ''L ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Academy Award For Best Documentary Feature
An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 385 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and Skills, skill, north of Ancient Athens, Athens, Greece. Etymology The word comes from the ''Academy'' in ancient Greece, which derives from the Athenian hero, ''Akademos''. Outside the city walls of Athens, the Gymnasium (ancient Greece), gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning. The sacred space, dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, had formerly been an olive Grove (nature), grove, hence the expression "the groves of Academe". In these gardens, the philosopher Plato conversed with followers. Plato developed his sessions into a method of teaching philosophy and in 3 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |