The role of Mordechai Podchlebnik was never going to be just another part for Jeremy Neumark Jones.The actor recognised the name as soon as he opened the script,even though the Holocaust survivor’s story is largely unknown (his Wikipedia page is a mere two paragraphs).
A decade earlier, a year out of university, Neumark Jones had sat down with a friend to watch Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In the nine-hour documentary epic,Podchlebnik recounted how he had escaped Chemno to share the depraved truth about the first Nazi extermination camp with a disbelieving world.
Jeremy Neumark Jones
Then there is the 35-year-old’s own lineage. His Jewish maternal grandfather fled Germany in the early 1930s, only to find himself interned as an enemy alien in Britain. He says he was “so moved by the script that I attached a note at the end of the audition tape telling Lior [Geller, the Israeli-American writer-director] a little bit about my family’s personal story”.
Jeremy Neumark Jones as Michael Podchlebnik and Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Szlama Ber Winer
It is difficult to believe that Podchlebnik and fellow escapee Szlama Ber Winer – who is played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen and was responsible for the first eyewitness account of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews – have not been immortalised on film until now.
In The World Will Tremble, we meet them in Chemno in Poland as Sonderkommandos, prisoners forced to dig the graves in which to bury both their communities and the Nazis’crimes. Meanwhile, the waves of new arrivals are told to carefully label their belongings so they can reclaim them after being taken to Leipzig factories to work. It is all part of an industrial deceit designed to transfer the human cargo most efficiently into the back of the Nazis’ experimental gas vans.
Podchlebnik and Ber Winer’s escape that could have saved the six million
Filming the agonising scene in which Podchlebnik recognises his wife and children while unloading bodies into a pit – before begging to be put to death himself – took its toll on Neumark Jones. “I was so worked up that when we moved on to take a different shot, I actually bust my head open with a shovel by accident,” he says on a video call from his home in Highbury. “I’d spent time with the people playing my family, so I could generate a bond with them. Sometimes Lior would yell ‘cut’, and we wouldn’t be able to look at each other in the face. We would pace around and feel completely bereft.”
Neumark Jones grew up as a member of Southgate and District Reform Synagogue, his life shaped by the “weekly rhythm” of synagogue and Sunday school. He still celebrates the festivals and was “at Purim with Lior just the other day. I think about my Judaism as being a part of my modern, very blended identity in a city that includes lots of blended identities,” he says.“I’m very happy to share it with people.”
The Londoner, who speaks four languages, is also proud to have recently reclaimed the German citizenship stolen from his granddad. Many recent films have garnered headlines for casting non-Jews in Jewish roles. Not this one. The shared heritage allowed the actors to commune over their inheritance. Neumark Jones says his co-star Charlie MacGechan, who plays Wolf, “had a whole installation of pictures in his room” – references to his great-uncle, Wolf Chevinsky, who died fighting for Britain in the war. “And then Oli, his father, was a Tunisian Jew.
Danny [Scheinmann], who plays Goldman, his mother was a refugee from Hungary.” The director kept his Jewish cast away from the Germans playing the Nazis for much of the 18-day shoot, says Neumark Jones, “to allow for the distance to show on screen”. Once they were allowed to mingle: “Their perspective was just as enlightening as some of ours. They were saying, ‘A lot of the time as a German actor, the only thing you can play internationally is a Nazi. Yet we have grown up hating that legacy.’”
Podchlebnik – who rebuilt his life in Israel, gave testimony at the Eichmann trial and faced his guards again as a witness in their prosecutions – was one of only four out of at least 172,000 people sent to Chemno to survive. It is where, I only discovered last year, my grandfather’s first wife, Zila Balsam, was dispatched on the 59th deportation from the Lodz ghetto to her death, aged 38, in May 1942. Just a month later, what became known as the Grojanowski Report (after one of Winer’s many pseudonyms) made it, via the underground resistance movements, to London, where it was broadcast by the BBC – the first news report of the Holocaust.
The acrid irony of the film’s title is that the two Jews from central Poland did manage to escape and disseminate the facts. However, tremble the world did not. Far from it. The Daily Telegraph broke the “greatest massacre in the world’s history” on page five of a six-page newspaper. Millions more would go on to be murdered.
“I think my initial pessimistic reaction is it did very little,” sighs Neumark Jones.“The war went on for a lot longer. It’s an early example of the way that disinformation and information can be conflated.” Speaking of the denial that met the revenants, and that still flourishes today, he adds: “I cannot believe that there is anyone who would deny that something like this happened on the scale it happened.“But it’s obviously a terrible tragedy that they did so much and it made such a limited impact at the time.”
• The World Will Tremble is available to watch now on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime
