Writer-director Lior Geller and actor Jeremy Neumark Jones sat down in conversation to discuss the recently released The World Will Tremble.

What The World Will Tremble does is tell the incredible untold true story of how a group of Polish Jews–held prisoners by the Nazis–attempted the impossible escape form the first Nazi death camp on January 19, 1942. Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Neumark Jones) had lost everything and they were forced to bury the bodies of people murdered in the gas vans. They lost their families and risked it all by bolting into the forest in hopes of alerting others as to what was happening in Poland. In doing so, they were able to provide the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust when Solomon’s story miraculously made it to London.

Interestingly, the story of Chelmno has never been told before in a narrative feature. What little there’s been featured in documentaries came by way of Claude Lanzmann’s epic Shoah. Moreover, there were no prior books about Solomon and Michael’s escape. As such, filmmaker Lior Geller’s research drew on various Holocaust museums and their archives. It was a passion project, too, with the filmmaker having spent ten years working on the film in one way or another.

The World Will Tremble is now playing in theaters. A VOD release is coming on April 8, 2025.

It’s so nice to chat with you today. How are you doing?
Lior Geller: Good, thanks. How are you?

Hanging in there.
Jeremy Neumark Jones: I’m doing well, thanks.

You spent ten years on research without any books or previous films about Chelmno. I imagine the pandemic didn’t make this process any easier.
Lior Geller: It actually did in my case. I was first exposed to it about 12 years ago now when I was researching my own family’s history and then I came across the story of Chelmno. I started reading more about it. I was somewhat familiar with it being the first death camp. I was familiar with the gas vans, but not so much with the story of Solomon and Michael and the escape. I was really shocked that the story had never been told before. I was looking for a book to adapt. I couldn’t find a book. There was none dedicated to the escape into this story. I started researching it.

The pandemic actually helped because I had just sold a series and I was going to fly to Europe to shoot it on March 13th, 2020—Friday the 13th—which was a day that everything got shut down, if you remember, here in the States. That kept me here and then I continued writing that particular project and then it was just put on hold.

Everybody was kind of complaining, Oh, I can’t do it. I actually took it as a blessing. I was home with my small children at the time. I took the time to really go back to this project, which was always a passion project of mine. It really enabled me to take the time and continue working on it. That’s when I finally kind of finished the script, during that time, during the pandemic. I see it as a blessing, which really made this film possible.

What role did Yad Vashem play in the research process?
Lior Geller: Early on, I had befriended a professor at Yad Vashem, Dr. Na’ama Shik. She works at Yad Vashem and she’s credited as our historical consultant on the film. She’s the one who helped guide me through the research process, because obviously, I’m not a historian or researcher.

But like I said before, there wasn’t really a lot of information about Chelmno available. With her help, I conducted the research. Going through the database of Yad Vashem, the archive that they have, obviously the best one perhaps, the archive at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum—these are online archives.

The one in Poland—that’s really where I found most of the information. The greatest piece of information we have about Chelmno is actually the testimony of Solomon Wiener. That testimony that he wrote is still to this day, as far as we know, the greatest source of information about Chelmno and about its operations.

Jeremy, your own family left Germany for England after the Nazis came into power. What was it about the script that drew you to the role?
Jeremy Neumark Jones: Well, the main thing that drew me was the writing. The script is incredible. I remember I was doing another job—I was in Hungary—I read the script ahead of being asked to tape for it. I’ve never before or since left a personal message at the end of doing these tapes.

As an actor, you get a set amount of tapes every time. You roll through them, you try and do your best and you send them off. A lot of the time, the project is only something that you are aware of at the moment that you’re reading the script, and then it goes. Half the time, you never even see the final product.

But this one, I read it and I thought there is something so special in the way that this has been constructed. After I’d finished doing the tapes, I left a personal message at the end to Lior, talking about my own family story. I have to say my grandfather was the one who immigrated and he left in 1933. He had to go into an internment camp during the war. But by and large, apart from some of my cousins, my family was not affected in terms of being killed by the Holocaust. They were affected in plenty of other ways.

I’m therefore not someone who really talks about my story that much because my family had been settled in London since the early 1930s. I’m a member of a Reform synagogue. We treat our Judaism as lots of people do, but it’s very much blended in with all of the other identities that I have.

There was something about this script, again, that just really brought out that feeling of like, wow, this is a story that resonates with me, and I feel like it’ll resonate with most people of the Jewish faith, and it’ll resonate with people beyond that, because most people have an interest in this story anyway.

But for me personally, that was the thing. It really brought out a feeling of my own connection to that story in a way that I hadn’t really experienced before, especially reading scripts. I’ve auditioned for lots of these kinds of things, right, but the scripts can be handled in very different ways, and there was something about the tightness of the writing, the clarity of the vision that spoke to me in a way that none of the others that I’d read before have.

What sort of preparation did you do to get into character?
Jeremy Neumark Jones: I had seen Shoah, the film by Claude Lanzmann, and Michael Podchlebnik has an interview in Shoah, which is—if you’ve ever seen it or for anyone who has seen it or if you haven’t, I would recommend it. You can just see that interview on YouTube alone. It’s for me one of the standout moments of the nine hours. There are other bits—I believe this is right, Lior, isn’t it—where you see Chelmno from other people’s perspectives. I believe there’s a Polish guy who’s from near there.

Lior Geller: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Claude Lanzmann went back there and he filmed some some civilians who lived nearby and then he also filmed the one other survivor, who was a survivor of Chelmno from the end of the war, Simon Srebnik, but Michael is featured a lot in it.

Jeremy Neumark Jones: Yeah, exactly. The research really started about five years before I even knew Lior existed, I knew that the project was there, I knew that it was being developed or anything like that. Me and my friend had seen it and then more specifically, after that, Lior gave us—I guess you’d call it a bibliography of things for us to look at and things for us to read.

Some of it, I’d read already because I was brought up Jewish. I was educated at the synagogue every week as well. And some of it I hadn’t. We’re talking about things like Viktor Frankl. We’re talking about things like Primo Levi. We’re talking about Steven Spielberg’s documentary that he produced, The Last Days, which is about the end of Auschwitz.

All of that really built a very, very vivid picture in my mind and I know that in the mind of everyone who worked on the project, because we all did it. We all were involved in that in doing that research. By the time that we came to film, it felt very much in place.

There was one final thing, which I think is worth mentioning while I remember it, which is Lior gave us all pictures of people who were of importance to our characters at the start of our filming process. That gave us something to really hook on to emotionally in the moment, right. You don’t really have to do a lot of research for that.

Michael is a father and other people are the children of people who are still back home nearby in places like Łódź. which is a village nearby, and Grodno. It was a combination of those things, really, that brought the character to life.

How do you lighten the atmosphere during breaks on or off set when you’re making a film with heavy themes and storytelling?
Lior Geller: Yeah, in the beginning, especially the first few days, we tried to film in chronological order as much as possible. We actually did start with the scenes at Chelmno, at the camp, and then we ended with the end of the escape. I remember the first few days were quite difficult.

Normally, sets are very loud, they’re very hectic. As soon as you say cut, there’s a lot going on. This was the first set I had ever been on when, as soon as I would say cut, it was quiet. The actors were kind of keeping off to themselves, the German actors, the actors who played the Jewish roles.

But then, shortly after, when the guys started getting to know each other more, especially our leads. I told Clare Harlow, our casting director, early on, that I want the best actors for the roles, but I want good people. She did that, I don’t know how, but she worked her magic and she put together this incredible group of people.

Shortly after we started filming, everybody was very close. It’s not obvious, but even the actors who play the German roles, David Kross and Michael Epp, they were just great guys and everybody was just joking around, They managed to find the levity in between those really harsh, harsh moments.

Michael Epp and David, they’re some of the nicest guys you’d ever meet. Some of the nicest people to play an SS officer—so different than their personalities on screen, it’s incredible.

How did the audience respond at the world premiere during the Miami Jewish Film Festival?
Lior Geller: So far, the screenings we’ve had have been have been tremendous, to be honest. Overwhelmingly positive. I had some screenings done even before Miami, some private screenings to Holocaust educational groups.

One screening that I had at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance, right before the screening started, I was told that there were Holocaust survivors in attendance. I didn’t know that. It was so nerve wracking to hear that right when the movie was about to start.

The whole time I’m watching the film, I’m thinking, oh, my G-d, they’re going to hate this. They’re going to start telling me things—it wasn’t like that or whatever. As soon as the lights came up, the Holocaust survivors that were there came up to me and said, This is the best film about the Holocaust I had ever seen. Or this was the most raw and unflinching look at the Holocaust. It just meant a great deal to me.

The same goes for people who have a connection to Michael Podchlebnik. He has family in Israel now, thankfully, that also helped me out in production. Having their support and their overwhelmingly positive reaction to the film has just really meant the world.

It’s unfathomable now to think that American newspapers published the account on page six and not page one. You would think something like that would be page one news!
Lior Geller: Yeah. The BBC and the Telegraph—at the time it was called the Daily Telegraph—they were the first to report it, June 26, 1942. It took a few days until the news reached the United States. Chicago Tribune, New York Times, they published it around early July—LA Times—and it was mostly relegated to a short paragraph at the end of the paper.

In fact, the only paper that I know of that put it on the front page was an African-American newspaper called the Pittsburgh Courier. They even put a line in there, I quote, but I believe it was something along the lines of, “These Nazis can teach even the Southern whites a few lessons.” I thought that was interesting that the only paper that I found that really put it on the front page was that one.

Lior, a few years ago, I joined in on the Shabbat Lounge Havdalah during Sundance 2022 and heard you talking about the fact that you were in the process of developing a series about the Maccabees. What is the current update on that?
Lior Geller: Yeah, that’s moving along. That was the series that I mentioned, by the way, that was about to go ahead during Covid. That’s still progressing. We hope to shoot it soon.

Yeah. It’d be nice to add something else other than these Hallmark Chanukah movies to the Chanukah rotation.
Lior Geller: Right. Yeah. Again, another true story, a historical story that’s really never been told before. I think it’s I think it’s incredible that nobody’s ever done the Maccabees. Many people have tried, but I hope that we could finally do it.

Antisemitism is at its highest levels since the Holocaust and this film tells an incredible story of resistance. What do you hope people take away from watching The World Will Tremble?
Lior Geller: I would say that it’s a story of resistance, a story of determination, a story of hope, but more than anything, I think it reminds us of the urgency to bear witness in a world that’s increasingly vulnerable to denial, to distortion of truth, and the eradication of truth. The fact that antisemitism, xenophobia, racism, but also Holocaust distortion, Holocaust denial is at an all-time high. I think this story that reveals for the first time the first eyewitness account of the horrors of the Holocaust is especially timely.

Jeremy Neumark Jones: I would say I think into that, that the humanity of all of these people I think is the thing that really shines through in the film. I think it’s one of the things which is central to stories about the Holocaust, which have been the most effective.

I think one of the things that a rise in antisemitism points to is also a rise in the diminishment of the humanity of people. You characterize them by these very broad and incredibly inaccurate brushstrokes and that diminishes the humanity of who they are.

I think it’s a very timely reminder, as it always is, that it’s easy to herd people up and characterize them in a specific way, but to do that, you take away I think the most important thing that they have which is their humanity. These are people with relationships, thoughts, beliefs, hopes, loves and all of those things. I think that’s very important to remember.

Vertical released The World Will Tremble in theaters on March 14, 2025. The film will be released on VOD on April 8, 2025.

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