This film accompanies the six last surviving Warsaw Ghetto uprising fighters, all over 80 years old, between 2003-2006. Kazik Rotem ,Masha futermilch–Gleitman ,Pnina Greenspan and Aharon Carmi live in Israel . Brunk Spigel lives in Canada . Marek Edelman decided to remain in Poland . Their memories from the uprising and their understanding of the events in retrospect, 60 years later, is different and far more complex than what has settled into the collective memory
Awards
- Silver Warsaw Phoenix – Warsaw Jewish Motifs Film Festival, Poland, 2007
Festivals
- Allentown Jewish Film Festival, USA, 2008
- Melbourne Jewish Film Festival, Australia, 2007
- Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, USA, 2007
- Jewish Motifs Film Festival, Warsaw, Poland, 2007
Additional info
Gallery
The Last Fighters to be shown at Museum Memorial de la Shoah in Paris on April 6, 2008:
http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/b_content/getContentFromNumLinkAction.do?itemId=888&type=1
“In The Last Fighters, filmmakers Yael Kipper and Ronen Zaretzky draw on the memories of six Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the largest organized Jewish resistance to the Nazis. Although in their 80s, the interviewees still recall events from over 60 years ago in vivid detail. In August 1942, after 300,000 Jews were taken from the ghetto, Jewish youth groups set aside political differences and formed the Jewish Fighting Organization, a unified front against the Nazis that-in preparation for battle-smuggled weapons and explosives into the ghetto. When the Germans arrived to remove the remaining 50,000 Jews the following year, they were met with surprisingly stiff resistance, until the Nazis began burning buildings, after which only a handful of fighters evaded death or capture. Computer-generated graphics and maps of Warsaw are intercut with contemporary images of ghetto buildings to help illustrate this history, but the emphasis is on the participants' remembrances of the uprising (the filmmakers accompany these former resistance fighters to important sites-such as the
sewer through which they escaped-and later to an awards ceremony in Poland). Although the subtitles sport a couple of typos and grammatical errors, The Last Fighters is still a solid film that covers an important facet of Holocaust history.”
J. Wadland, Video Librarian