The World Will Tremble Brings A Long-Buried True Story of The Holocaust to Light

The history of cinema is filled with powerful dramas about the Holocaust, and films ranging from Sophie’s Choice to Schindler’s List have told powerful stories of survival and resistance. Still, there are stories left to be told, and some of the most extraordinary true accounts remain largely unknown. One such story is that of Solomon Weiner and Michal Podchlebnik, two Jewish prisoners who escaped the Chełmno extermination camp and became the first eyewitnesses to alert the world about the Nazi genocide. Their harrowing journey is now at the center of The World Will Tremble, the latest film from Academy Award-nominated director Lior Geller, featuring Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Nuemark Jones as Weiner and Podchlebnik.

“It all started about 12 years ago when I was researching my one family’s history and the Holocaust,” Geller says. It was then that Geller learned the story of Chełmno and its importance in history. While  Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz are names that are known to nearly all students of history, Chełmno is all but forgotten. Located in Nazi-occupied Poland, it was the first camp built explicitly for mass murder, utilizing gas vans to kill prisoners upon arrival. In 1942, Michal Podchlebnik and Solomon Weiner were among a handful of Jewish prisoners forced to burn the bodies of those killed in the camp’s gas vans. Realizing they would eventually be murdered as well, the two men devised a plan to flee. One night, under the cover of darkness, they escaped into the Polish countryside, evading Nazi patrols and surviving against impossible odds. Eventually, they reached the Łódź Ghetto, where they relayed what they had seen to the Jewish resistance. 

“The challenge wasn’t dramatizing the truth — it was making sure people believed it.”

“I was just amazed that this story hadn’t been told before,” Geller says. “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.” At this point, Geller realized that if he was going to tell this story, some serious research on his part was required. Their testimony would become the first detailed account of the Holocaust sent to the Allies. Yet, despite its historical significance, their firsthand account has become largely overlooked or forgotten. Geller believes this omission speaks to a larger issue in how history is remembered. “The Holocaust was so vast, with so many horrors, that some of the earliest testimonies were dismissed as exaggerations,” Geller says. “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.”

For lead actor Jeremy Neumark Jones, playing Michal Podchlebnik was a deeply personal experience. “The research really started a long time before I knew the project existed,” Nuemark Jones says. His first encounter with the character came years before he even auditioned — through a chance viewing of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah, a 9 hour film that is still considered one of the most definitive documentations of the atrocities, in which Podchlebnik was briefly interviewed. “It’s a very touching interview — [I]  remember watching that interview and being haunted by it,” Neumark Jones says. “And it really stuck with me.” When the script for The World Will Tremble came to him, he recognized the story instantly. To prepare for the role, Neumark Jones studied archival footage, including Podchlebnik’s testimony from the Eichmann trial. He also worked with historians to understand the physical and psychological toll of surviving Chełmno. Beyond that, Nuemark Jones credits the director’s approach for bringing so much reality to the film. “The biggest gift he gave us all is that he didn’t let us fall into sentimentality,” he says. “I think that’s very important. These are a hard, resilient people living in the moment. They have no sense of what’s happening to them … Film is an amazing privilege as an actor, because quite often you don’t have to do a leap of imagination; you’re witnessing the thing happening in the moment as you’re doing it.”  

Geller’s commitment to authenticity meant extensive research and consulting with experts from institutions like Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Every detail, from the markings prisoners wore to the mechanics of the gas vans, was drawn from historical records. “One of the most shocking things was how little even Holocaust educators knew about Chełmno,” Geller says. “When they watched the film, some asked, ‘Did you make that up?’ But every scene is based on archival research. The challenge wasn’t dramatizing the truth — it was making sure people believed it.”

“The Holocaust was so vast, with so many horrors, that some of the earliest testimonies were dismissed as exaggerations”

The director also sees the film as deeply relevant to today’s world, with the rise of antisemitism, othering and fascism around the globe and in the United States. “I think it has a particular relevance today in an era of the eradication of truth,” Geller says. “The distortion of truth is so prevalent today that I feel the story of Soloman and Michal and their escape from Chelmo, and the creation of the first eyewitness testimony — it’s more relevant today than ever.”

As The World Will Tremble opened in limited release over the weekend and is set for a wider release in theaters and streaming on-demand, it stands out as a must-see film and a powerful testament to the best and worst in humanity. It’s a long overdue account of the fragility of life, the strength of truth and the unbreakable human spirit. 

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