British leads for Holocaust film

THE astonishing true story of the beginnings of the Holocaust is to be told in a movie which has just finished filming — with two British actors in the lead roles.

The World Will Tremble is based on the story of how a small band of prisoners escaped from the first Nazi death camp and provided the earliest eyewitness accounts of the systematic murder of Jews.

Some 300,000 are believed to have perished in the Chelmno camp in Poland; gassed in three adapted trucks and then dumped in mass graves.

There were only a handful of known survivors and the film tells the story of two of them. Solomon Wiener is played by Londoner Oliver JacksonCohen (pictured, right), best known for the film The Invisible Man.

Michael Podchlebnik is played by Jeremy Neumark Jones (pictured, left), who was in Grantchester and Belgravia. His grandparents were German Jews who moved to England to escape the Nazis. Writer and director Lior Geller tells me he spent ten years researching the story, working with researchers from the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. Geller said: ‘Of the approximately 300,000 men, women and children sent to Chelmno between December 1941 and January 1945, only four survived. Of those, only three provided testimonies. In addition, the death camp was completely destroyed by the Germans three days before the arrival of the Red Army, in January 1945, to eliminate all evidence.’ The World Will Tremble was in production at the time of the Hamas massacre in Israel, on October 7. Geller adds: ‘It is a tremendous honour to share this story with the world, especially now.’