Out of the Ashes

the actress playing the role of Dr Gisela Pearl should be nominated for her performance. the film showed the courage of the human spirit in the face of hate and tragedy. after looking at the film, I was humbled by the courage of this woman who lost all her family but decide in spite of what happened to her to survive and help other fellow humans. she also had to go through the pain of defending herself after being accused of collaborating with the Nazi. Anyone in the same position had little choices but to try to remain alive. She did more than that and for that reason she should be honoured for her heroism. I am full of admiration for the Jewish people time and time again when I see films such as this one.

The first 20 minutes was slow and I thought this was going no where. But, then when we start to see flashbacks of the concentration camps and what Perl saw and endured there; it gets really good. Christine Lahti is really good and will surely be nominated for an Emmy. I mean, it was awful how the interview panel tries to make Dr. Perl look bad because of the things she had to do in order to survive her imprisonment. And the film does have those shocking Nazi moments, like shootings in the head, killing pregnant women, and experiments on babies.

FINAL VERDICT: This was a good movie about a Jewish Dr. who struggles with the moral choices she must make to survive Nazi imprisonment. Definitely catch this if you have Showtime.

It is a TV movie based on the memoirs of a gynecologist from Auschwitz. This film is a linear and has two parts. The flashbacks to Auschwitz are nice and powerful, but the film's present-day sequences and the scenes where "Perl" questions his citizenship are contrived and tacky. The film wants to expose the viewer to judgment and position him, but it is not successful in this task and remains on the surface and is limited to sloganing dialogues. In general, the movie has nothing new to say, and reading the book it is adapted from is much more interesting And it is acceptable for broadcast on TV.

The true story of the Late Doctor Gisella Perl is unforgettable and the stuff of which legends and heroines are made. She was truly a most remarkable human being.

However, in my opinion this made-for-television movie did not do justice to Dr. Perl's true life story. The scenes and sets were cheap and recognizable from other contemporary movies made by the same production company. The script (by Anne Meredith) was over-dramatized, stilted and incomplete, e.g. the horror of Dr Perl having to smother to death many live birth children in order to save the lives of their mothers is not mentioned and was one horror, along with the hundreds of abortions she performed to save lives, that haunted Dr. Perl until her death.

The acting and script were so stilted and so melodramatic that it deterred from the true story and made me question if the story could be true or should be taken seriously. Only because I read Dr. Perl's book and many articles about her life that I knew the story to be true. Some of the actors are guilty of terrible overacting, especially in many scenes revealing details of Dr. Perls's life that really call for, nay demand, understatement that would have been far more effective for the realization of the real Dr. Perl and her family. Beau Bridges was good as the lead immigration officer (his part scripted to make him appear as an interrogator for the Inquisition) and Christine Lahti gave a fair, albeit an over the top, melodramatic performance and was often guilty of just plain overacting. Richard Crenna and Bruce Davison are as wooden as manikins in a window display and their roles in this movie still escape me. All in all the script, sets and acting were inferior and deficient.

This story deserves a better treatment than it received in this television movie because Dr. Gisella Perl was a real heroine, not just a death camp survivor.

I give this movie 3/5 stars, mainly for Dr. Perl's true story, not the acting, script or cinematography.

Out of the Ashes is one of the best portrayals of the life of a Holocaust survivor I have seen yet. As an avid researcher of the Holocaust I have read Dr. Perl's 1948 novel of her life as a concentration camp survivor and the accounts of her work as a camp doctor. Showtime could not have done a more superior job bringing this woman's story to the screen. This is certainly a movie that will grip at your heart strings , Jewish or not. Auschwitz was re-created with fierce accuracy. Even the most hardened heart could not feel anything but pure admiration as the story unfolds of Dr. Perl's struggle to help the women of Auschwitz and her own struggle for survival. Dr. Perl single handedly assisted in the preservation of the Jewish people by helping the innocent women victims to stay alive and fight with the hope that they would one day present the world with a new generation of Jews that would be free. She then came to America and assisted in delivering this new generation before she retired in Israel and ended her life there doing volunteer work. This is an extraordinary story of one of the bravest woman I have ever learned of. I could not give this movie a higher rating.