Filmmaker Laszlo Nemes and actor Geza Rohrig stood on both sides of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Dario Gabbai, grasping his hands tightly as they slowly and painstakingly led him up the path to a home in Westwood on a recent Monday morning.
Gabbai, 93, is perhaps the last living member of the Sonderkommando, prisoners forced to drag bodies out of the gas chambers, to burn them in crematoria ovens, to grind their bones and shovel the ashes into the nearby Vistula River.
Nemes and Rohrig, respectively, are the co-writer/director and leading actor in the film “Son of Saul,” which offers a visceral glimpse into the life of a Sonderkommando rendered emotionally numb by his gruesome work until he discovers a boy who has survived the gas chamber, only to witness a Nazi doctor murder the boy minutes later. The eponymous Saul embarks upon a feverish mission to find a rabbi to say Kaddish and to bury the boy, even as his comrades are plotting an armed rebellion against the Nazis.
The movie has received a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign-language film, among numerous other honors, and is considered a virtual shoo-in for an Oscar nomination next month.
Nemes and Rohrig were in Los Angeles last week as part of the movie’s extensive press tour, but meeting Gabbai “is definitely a highlight,” Rohrig said in an interview as Nemes nodded.
Rohrig, an observant Jew, cited a character in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” who tells another character, “ ‘In deference to your [enormous] suffering,’ then goes down on his knees,” said the Hungarian-born actor, who met Gabbai for the first time last month. “I feel the same way in the presence of Dario. He’s been through such an ordeal. I think he sanctified life by trying his very best to survive. … It’s very meaningful just to have a conversation with him.”
Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is releasing the film, also attended the meeting, as did Hilary Helstein, founding director of the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, who videotaped it.
When Rohrig first met Gabbai in November, “I did not ask him to see the movie,” the actor said. Rohrig was concerned the film might prove too traumatic for the elderly survivor, who has suffered nightmares of the camp over the decades.
It was a sentiment shared by Gabbai’s closest friends and even an official at the USC Shoah Foundation. Gabbai had become frail in recent months, finding it difficult to walk.
“Everyone said, ‘Don’t see this movie,’ ” Gabbai told the Journal recently. “But I thought, ‘What do you mean, don’t see the movie?’ I had to see it because who else is going to tell the world [if it’s accurate]? I’m the last [Sonderkommando] alive.”
Even so, before Gabbai was to view the film at the home of his good friend Paul Soroudi, a 45-year-old entrepreneur, another close friend, ophthalmologist Warren Reingold, took this reporter aside. “I feel like I must protect Dario,” Reingold said. Both Soroudi and Reingold had spent a mostly sleepless night worrying about Gabbai seeing the movie.
When Gabbai requested that he view the movie in private, I left, only to receive a call from Soroudi about an hour later saying Gabbai had been fine with the film, which his friends played with the lights on and the sound turned low. They invited me back to screen the second half of the drama with Gabbai, who was calm and dignified as “Son of Saul” played to its harrowing conclusion.
“The movie is pretty accurate,” Gabbai said afterward. The sounds emanating from the gas chamber mostly rang true. “But nothing you can see on film can ever be 100 percent,” he added.
Several days later, as the filmmakers met with Gabbai at Soroudi’s home, Nemes revealed that he had never before met a living Sonderkommando. He had based “Son of Saul” on 10 years of meticulous research of survivors’ testimonies in books such as Gideon Greif’s “We Wept Without Tears,” which includes Gabbai’s story.
“But it’s good that we didn’t meet before, or I might not have made this movie — because I would never have been able to transmit what Dario had to go through,” Nemes said. “I just tried to make people have a feeling of something that cannot be communicated only with words.”
Over the next 90 minutes, Gabbai described how he had been forced onto cattle cars with his family in his native Salonika, Greece, and endured an 11-day ride to Auschwitz, where his parents and younger brother were immediately killed.
Rohrig noted that Greek Jews had been forced to pay for their train tickets to the camp. “And they starved to death,” Gabbai said.
Did you ever find anybody alive in the gas chamber? the filmmakers wanted to know. Gabbai replied that his cousin had discovered a baby boy who was immediately shot to death by a Nazi.
Gabbai told of how he and his two cousins, also Sonderkommandos, once encountered two relatives destined to die in the gas chamber. The Sonderkommandos told the doomed men where to stand inside the chamber so they would die in two minutes instead of five. After burning their bodies in the ovens, the cousins scooped out their ashes and buried them outside the crematorium while reciting Kaddish.
Gabbai never saw inside a gas chamber as it was operating, but he described the fiery pits into which Nazis shot inmates to murder them when the chambers were at capacity. “If you were there, you can’t ever forget it,” Gabbai said, describing memories of “the blood coming out and having to clean it up.”
The filmmakers asked Gabbai whether he recalled religious Sonderkommandos celebrating Shabbat, as seen in the film (he had), and whether he still dreamed about Auschwitz.
“I try not to,” Gabbai replied. “If you start doing that then it would be very tough to continue.”
Gabbai noted that many Jews have blamed the Sonderkommando for what they perceive as collaborating with the Nazis. “That’s why we made this film,” Nemes said. While holding Gabbai’s hand, Rohrig added that the survivor had completed the mitzvah of staying alive in order to tell his story.
Gabbai praised the actor for his performance and affectionately called Nemes “my director.” The filmmakers promised to visit Gabbai again when they return to Los Angeles for the Golden Globes ceremony in January.
“Dario will never be able to fully communicate what he went through,” Nemes said in a separate interview. “In a way, he remains forever the bearer of a secret, and that’s tragic. I made this film to at least try to transmit, in a visceral way, this experience. But it’s only a faint attempt.”
“Son of Saul” opens in Los Angeles theaters on Dec. 18
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.