The World Will Tremble is a 2025 historical drama film that takes us back to the early days of the Holocaust, giving us a glimpse into an interesting time in history when people hardly believed the claims of the atrocities being carried out by the Nazis. While many films on the subject of the Holocaust have dealt with time periods when the torture and killings were somewhat known to the entire world, the plot here follows Solomon Wiener’s experiences at the Chelmno labor camp, where Jews were taken for physical labor. Overall, The World Will Tremble often takes the more conventional style of filmmaking, but it still makes for a gripping and impactful experience.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
The World Will Tremble begins by establishing the setting of its plot, on the 19th of January, 1942, when the Germans had already set up labor camps across various parts of Poland. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazi government made every effort to turn the country’s lands into German territory, which required tremendous physical labor. As Hitler had already ordered the persecution of the Jewish people, the representatives of the Nazi party in Poland naturally started picking up Jewish men and women from the various communities and neighborhoods where they had assembled. When the invasion took place in 1939, and the Jewish people realized that they would soon face extreme discrimination, they moved into ghettos in various corners of the country in an effort to keep themselves safe.
It was from these very ghettos that the Nazi soldiers started rounding up men and women, telling them that they would be taken to labor camps, where they would have to work for the government and earn a respectable livelihood for themselves. It is at one such supposed labor camp, in Chelmno, that the film takes place, and it begins with a group of Jewish men being forced to do backbreaking work on one usual morning. When one of these workers, Solomon Wiener, first loses one of his shoes in the mud and breaks it in half while trying to pry it out, he is beaten by the Nazi guards for this mere mistake. One of Solomon’s friends, Michael Podchlebnik, offers him a piece of cloth to tie over his toes so that they do not get injured during the work.
The workers have been designated to dig up enormous holes in the ground for unspecified reasons, but their concentration is currently on a very different matter, as made clear by the whispered conversations among them. A leader of sorts among this group, named Wolf, has been seemingly planning an unbelievable escape from the labor camp, where there is no respect or dignity for the Jews whatsoever, and they are instead tortured and killed. Although Michael wants to reunite with his wife and children, whom he had left behind in his native village of Kolo, he is afraid of the consequences of running and considers Wolf’s plan impossible to execute. Solomon is of the same opinion, even though he knows that staying at the camp will ultimately lead to his death, as he had witnessed the murder of his parents and sisters on the very day that they had arrived at the place.
However, Wolf remains determined to carry out the plan and does not put his hopes in the Russian army marching towards Poland to help them out, which most of the workers look forward to. His exact intention is to flee the Nazis while being driven back to the camp from work on the truck and then head towards the nearby town of Grabow, where a Jewish ghetto still exists. He states that he personally knows the rabbi at the ghetto and is sure that the man will help them. While Solomon and Michael still remain confused over whether to be a part of such an outlandish plan of escape, tragedy strikes when Wolf and another of their friends, Monik, are killed by the Nazi soldiers, leaving them as the only ones to carry out the attempt.
What atrocities does Solomon witness at Chelmno?
Before they can attempt an escape, Solomon and Michael have to go through the forced work for the day, and they are selected for sorting duties, along with Wolf, who was still alive at the time. While Michael had once been selected for the duty earlier and therefore knows the responsibilities associated with it, Solomon and Wolf are completely new to this part of the camp. However, what they witness over the next hour or so is enough to leave them traumatized for the rest of their lives. A group of Jews is brought over to the camp, where they are very warmly greeted by the Nazi commandant, Lange, and his assistant, Lenz. The group had been brought from one single community and ghetto, with multiple families having come in search of respectable work.
Lange assures the group that their days of struggle are over, as they have been selected for their hard work and dedication and will soon be moved to a new state-of-the-art factory in the German city of Leipzig, where they will be given a place to stay and four meals a day. Promising that there will also be equal pay as the Germans for the Jewish workers at the factory, Lange states that they will have to go through a minor disinfecting process in order to avoid the spread of typhus in the factory and the camp. He then employs his soldiers to mark the belongings of each of the families with their names so that they can be easily returned to the correct owners in Leipzig and then leads the people inside.
While this treatment by the Nazis definitely feels very odd, The World Will Tremble horrifically reveals their true nature by setting viewers up with these false claims, which were indeed made to the Jewish families brought to Chelmno. The innocent people were told that they had been selected to work at German factories in exchange for fair compensation and brought to the execution camp at Chelmno, where all their belongings were taken away and they were stripped of most clothes, after which they were forced into a van.
A thick pipe was attached to a vent leading inside the very van, with its other side fixed to the exhaust pipe of the vehicle. The truck was then driven around for a few kilometers, during which time the toxic smoke emitted by it was directly looped back into its holding, which the Jews had been forced into. Hundreds of innocent Jews were killed by asphyxiation in this unimaginably cruel manner, and their bodies were then dumped into open graves in a forest camp nearby.
On this particular day in the film, the Jewish families that arrive at Chelmno are treated in a similar manner, as they are stuffed into the back of a truck and killed mercilessly, with their helpless screams filling the air while being choked to death. This is not a new experience for Solomon, though, as he and the others had already heard the screams of the victims too many times to know what went on at the camp, despite having never been selected for the sorting process. He and his friends are basically made to go through the belongings brought by the families and sort them according to the various types of items before being ordered to run behind the murderous van and then bury the bodies in the holes they had dug up earlier in the day, as seen at the beginning of the film.
The Nazis therefore not just lied to the Jews about the great life they would have in the near future but also ensured that they wrote letters for their loved ones. The soldiers would then post these letters and pretend that they had been sent from Leipzig so that the family members of the deceased would also gladly come to the camp in hopes of being transferred to Germany and could be exterminated easily. The lies and the pretense were all parts of their cruel treatment of their victims, and they experienced some perverse pleasure toying around with the helpless people. The few individuals who still managed to keep breathing after being intoxicated by the fumes of the van were shot dead on the spot.
While burying the bodies, Michael suddenly spots his wife and children among them, which absolutely shatters him, and he expresses how he has no purpose left in life. The man begs the soldiers to shoot him right there so that he can reunite with his deceased family, at least in spirit, but he is denied this mercy as well. The Germans consider Michael to be a physically strong man who can still be forced to work for a few more months, and so they refuse to kill him just yet. After being returned to the camp, the workers are made to go through an extreme workout in order to humiliate them and also shake them down for any contraband they have on them. This is how Monik is killed: after he is found with a knife, the soldiers slit his throat with the very weapon.
One of the young women from the group had been intentionally kept back at the camp in order for the commandant to sexually exploit her for a couple of days before killing her. In a depraved effort to humiliate her and the other workers, the soldiers make them dance while shooting at their feet, which ultimately gets the woman killed as well. The rest of the workers are made to face the firing squad with glass bottles on their heads, and this is when Wolf is murdered, since the Nazis have no consideration for the lives of the workers either, as they are Jewish too.
Did Solomon take the news of the atrocities at Chelmno to the outside world?
It is after Wolf passes away and secretly leaves him a shard of glass from the bottle that had been cruelly placed on his head that Solomon decides to go through with the escape plan, and he takes Michael with him as well. With the help of the rest of the workers, they manage to cut the tarp on the side of the truck taking them to work and jump out of the moving vehicle through this hole. They run through the forest while being shot at, and both men end up injuring their legs. While Solomon breaks his leg because of the reckless jump, Michael is shot in his leg, but the bullet luckily makes a clean exit from the other side. Holding on to their determination, they cross the freezing cold river, which is possible only because of the clear, sunny weather on the day, and then find themselves on the property of a local Polish family.
Most of the Polish non-Jews had become allies to the Nazis by now and were regularly rounding up Jews for the camps in exchange whatever compensation the soldiers offered them. However, much to the good fortune of Solomon and Michael, a woman at the house they hide at immediately helps them escape by giving them some railway company uniforms and also some food. They steal the motorbike of the woman’s husband and make their way towards Grabow. Despite being stopped on the way to help a Nazi convoy recover from a road accident, the men finally manage to reach the ghetto in Grabow. They have to sneak past the Judenrat guards (Jews who had been assigned by the Nazis as administrators at the ghettos) to reach the house of the rabbi Wolf had mentioned.
Although Rabbi Schulman is welcoming of the men, he is in absolute disbelief in the face of their reports from Chelmno and does not take them seriously at first. Schulman still believes that although the Nazis have been targeting and ostracizing Jews and making them forcefully work for the government, it is impossible that they are simply exterminating the people of a religion in such a ruthless and open manner, without the knowledge of the world. Despite still not being very sure of the allegations being made by the two men, the rabbi still decides to support them and spreads news of the matter to his network in Warsaw, from where the news is spread to other parts of Europe. Solomon’s testimony was ultimately broadcast on BBC Radio in June of 1942, and it became the first reported news of the Holocaust.
What happened to Solomon and Michael?
Throughout the duration of The World Will Tremble, the character of Solomon Wiener is seemingly compared to various birds and animals, possibly hinting at his innocent but resilient nature. At the beginning, a small bird is seen repeatedly trying to land on a tree that is its home but being unable to do so as the tree is being chopped down, symbolizing the massive uprooting and displacement that the Jewish people had to experience during the time. Next, Solomon either hallucinates or spots a deer in the nearby forest momentarily, and the animal is symbolic of his clueless and dazed reaction to the atrocities going on around him. During their escape, he and Michael come across a wolf in the forest, which initially growls at them but eventually turns tail and runs after hearing the movement of the Nazi unit. The wolf possibly represents the true mettle and relentlessness of Solomon and Michael, who continue to fight for a free life despite being physically and mentally drained.
In The World Will Tremble’s ending, despite these feats of heroism, Solomon Wiener could not ultimately live as a free man. Months after his escape from Chelmno, Solomon was arrested by the Nazi police in Grabow, where he had been searching for his missing relatives, and was sent to the extermination camp at Belzec. Solomon Wiener was gassed to death in April of 1942 at the Belzec death camp. Just three weeks after Solomon and Michael’s escape, the Nazis visited the Jewish ghetto in Grabow and rounded up the people there, with Rabbi Schulman accompanying them despite knowing the travesty that was awaiting them. Only Michael Podchlebnik managed to survive the Holocaust by hiding out at a Polish farm, following which he immigrated to Israel and settled there. Michael even testified in court against the soldiers at Chelmno during the war trials in 1962, since he was the only survivor from the place alive at the time. The World Will Tremble ends with a short clip of Michael talking about the day he was denied death by the Nazis after he found his wife and children dead, from a TV interview in 1979.
