Der letzte Mentsch (2014)

Marcus Schwartz is an old man who lives in Cologne. He survived the Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps, but never spoke about it and even took another name. He has always repressed his past as Menachem Teitelbaum and even refused the state pension to which he was entitled as a Jew. As the end of his life approaches, he develops a wish to be buried traditionally in a Jewish cemetery. To do so, Marcus must obtain documents proving that he is Jewish. The rebellious Gül, a young German Turk, spontaneously drives him in her boyfriend’s car all the way to Vác on the Danube in Hungary, where he was born and from where his family was deported to the German concentration camps in 1942, to look for traces and the necessary proof. At an elegant hotel in Budapest where his parents had worked and were betrayed to the Gestapo, the descendant of the hotel’s owners, his former playmate, no longer remembers Marcus but pays his bill. In his birthplace in Hungary, he meets the blind Ethel, who seems to have been waiting for him for a long time. They grow close and tell the rabbi that they intend to marry. Before that can happen, Ethel walks into the water and drowns. A young employee of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation eventually persuades Marcus to share his memories of the past in front of a camera. Even the help of his old Greek friend Mikos, who lives there and in his youth also worked for the family as a Shabbos goy on Saturdays, is not enough to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles in the community. The young local rabbi turns him away several times, and he does not receive the certificate he wants. During a visit to the new synagogue, Marcus searches for a legendary chair that supposedly grants wishes—not knowing that the original has been in Israel for 80 years. He sits on the chair he is shown, believing it to be the right one. After the service ends, they discover that he has died during it. His wish for a Jewish burial is nevertheless fulfilled, in his old homeland. Gül returns to Germany alone, now carrying Marcus’s concentration camp number as a tattoo on her forearm.