Oliver Jackson-Cohen stars in The World Will Tremble, the new film that tells the true story of how a group of Polish Jewish prisoners escaped from the first Nazi death camp during World War II.
Directed by Lior Geller, the film follows the previously untold story of the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust. Jackson-Cohen plays Solomon Wiener, who was held captive as a gravedigger and had to bury his own, before he and fellow prisoner Michael Podchlebnik, played by Jeremy Neumark Jones in the film, decided to escape.
Both Wiener and Podchlebnik lost their families to the Nazis. They escaped the prison camp Chelmno not for themselves, but instead for other Jews and in an attempt to warn the rest of the world about the horrific scale of the Nazi crimes.
“It’s a shame to say I didn’t know how it all began, never really stopped to think about the intricacies of how this process kind of ran,” Jackson-Cohen said. “It was sort of quite an eye-opener and quite an arresting thing also to know that every single thing in the script is an entirely true story. So it’s quite sobering.”
This is the only film to portray Chelmno on screen. Additionally, there is not one book, whether academic or fiction, that depicts Wiener and Podchlebnik’s escape. Jackson-Cohen says it feels so important for their story to finally be told in this film.
“The Holocaust survivors, there are so few and in not very long there won’t be any. And we forget, with history. We like to forget,” Jackson-Cohen said. “It’s such an exceptional thing what these people went through and what they did that I think stories, and especially true stories like that, really deserve to be heard.”
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