Steven Spielberg has grasped something profound about the righteous use of film. Long after ET and Jaws have blended into the stacks of oldies at Blockbuster, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation—which Spielberg himself conceived while working on Schindler's List—will leave an enduring record to stand with such classics as Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the Shoah Foundation will endow posterity with a record that no book can match. It will have preserved for the ages the personal testimonies of survivors and perpetrators of the ultimate failure of Western civilization. Drawing on this unparalleled archive, The Last Days chronicles the lives of five Hungarian Jews. Directed by James Moll, it is one film in a projected series of documentaries from the Shoah Foundation.

A great failure of traditional histories is their overwhelming focus on generals, despots, and tyrants. We meet the Borgias, the popes, the monarchs, and all the other larger-than-life players, but we do not meet ordinary people like ourselves. We do not encounter everyday citizens, driven into Faustian bargains that will alter not only history, but themselves. It is this deficit that The Last Days powerfully corrects.

In one of the most exquisitely agonizing moments ever filmed, Auchwitz survivor Renee Firestone sits in a charmingly appointed Bavarian den. Beside her is a soft-spoken, kindly looking gentleman who calls to mind the late Francis Schaeffer. This is a wretched moment for Firestone; the gentleman is Dr. Hans Munch, who conducted medical experiments at Auchwitz under the direction of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. Firestone's sister, Klara, was selected for experimentation at Auchwitz because of her smooth skin. The Nazi doctors cut her up like a dog, and when she was of no further use as a specimen, she was dispatched, perhaps with a lethal injection, perhaps to the gas chambers. Or maybe she died from the experiments. This is what Renee Firestone hopes to find out.

In an interview before his meeting with Firestone, Dr. Munch explains that he was acquitted at the Nuremberg trials because he was not completely enthusiastic about the experiments. When Firestone, choking with humiliation, politely shows him the camp records, he peruses them like a physician scanning the charts of a personal patient. "Alles gut, alles gut," he pronounces with an impeccable bedside manner. When Firestone notes that after a short period of time her sister seems to have evaporated, he replies breezily, "Well, you were there, so you know. That was about the average length of time." Dr. Munch might be a travel agent discussing a vacation at Club Med. He cannot apologize or even acknowledge Firestone's grief. Outwardly, he acts as though the two of them have been inconvenienced by forces beyond their control.

In terms of sheer numbers of victims, the Nazis' Final Solution is not unique. Stalin killed more, as did Mao. The Hutus slaughtered a larger proportion of their own populace in a shorter time, as did the Khmer Rouge. The British successfully exterminated the Tasmanian race from the face of the earth in the last century; not one Tasmanian is left. Yet the Holocaust overshadows these events for its unmitigated premeditation. The Nazis were no frenzied, peasant mob. They arose from one of the most civilized of modern nations, the birthplace of the Reformation. They horrify us precisely because they were so much like us.

The Holocaust embodies what Roger Shattuck described in the January 1998 issue of the Atlantic Monthly as "radical evil," that is, "immoral behavior so pervasive in a person or society that scruples and constraints have been utterly abandoned … [a] form of evil, so extreme that it can no longer recognize its own atrocity."

In keeping with the Shoah Foundation's mandate, director/editor Moll has chosen one specific aspect of the Holocaust for his film: the nine-month slaughter of Hungarian Jews at the end of the war. Because this litany of misery is too enormous to comprehend, The Last Days focuses on the lives of five survivors.

Congressman Tom Lantos of California is the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the House. As a boy he shuttled fake passports between the safe houses of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, protected by a cadet's uniform and his Aryan appearance. Lantos's family were not so lucky; they were wiped out in the Holocaust.

Arriving in the United States in l947, Lantos went on to marry another survivor whom he had known before the war. In one of the film's most touching moments, Lantos explains how his two daughters told him that they planned to give him many, many grandchildren as a gift in memory of the family he had lost. They made good on their promise, and we see the enormous brood, joyfully frolicking on the green lawns of Lantos's home. Yet, despite his current blessings, Lantos is unable to imagine a loving God presiding over the carnage that resides indelibly in his soul.

Another survivor tells us the precise moment she stopped talking to God. It's hard to imagine anything that could have been more faith-killing than life in the Nazi death machine. Bill Basch recounts the moment he had to break a promise to a lifelong friend to save his own life. Renee Firestone recalls hearing screams and shooting in a neighboring barracks. In the morning, the corpses of dwarfs were piled outside like cordwood and left there for three days. In the course of the film, these horrors are recounted by ordinary people in everyday language. It is left for the scholars and theologians to explain to future generations how it happened and what to do to keep it from recurring.

The fate of Hungary's Jews was both the same as and different from that of other European nations under Nazi domination. Fearful of the Soviet Union and resentful of the annexation of land by Czechoslovakia after World War I, Hungary signed a pact with Nazi Germany, in part to establish a market for agricultural surpluses. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Miklos Kallay's government consistently rejected German demands to implement the Final Solution in Hungary.

German pressure to murder Hungarian Jews continued unabated, with the Kallay government steadfastly refusing to acquiesce. After the German losses at Stalingrad, Kallay began secret negotiations with the Allies to switch sides as soon as British and American troops reached Hungarian soil. It was at this point that the radical evil of the Final Solution revealed another dimension, what Shattuck calls "metaphysical evil": "an attitude of assent and approval toward moral and radical evil as evidence of superior human will and power."

Irreversibly losing a two-front war, the Nazis refused to negotiate a surrender. They continued fighting, while diverting enormous resources of troops and materiel to the murder of civilian Jews in Hungary. On March 19, 1944, German troops occupied Hungary and began the slaughter, willingly abetted by countless Hungarians. In less than three months, nearly 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary. Trains that might have carried troops and supplies to the front hauled men, women, and children to the ovens of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In the final nine months of the war, 657,000 of Hungary's 825,000 Jews had perished. The killing accelerated until American and Soviet troops entered the camps. Thus, the Nazis' embrace of metaphysical evil hastened their own demise.

Three American liberators are interviewed for the film. To this day they remain profoundly shaken by the experience. A white officer recalls that he was so outraged by the carnage that he turned several Nazis over to the Jews, "so they could tear them apart." A profoundly decent Nisei veteran weeps at the memory of what he saw, unable a half-century later to comprehend it. An African American soldier, now a physician, recounts a surprise visit, late in life, by friends of a Jew he rescued.

George Orwell knew that whoever controls the historical record controls the truth. If outright Holocaust deniers remain a small and generally discredited fringe group, the number of Americans who have accepted grossly distorted accounts of the Holocaust is shockingly large. (Consider only the crowds across the nation who have listened approvingly to the anti-Semitic tirades of Nation of Islam minister Khalid Muhammmad.) Against such lies, the Shoah Foundation has given us an enduring antidote: the bitter truth.

Stefan Ulstein is a teacher and film critic.

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