Géza Röhrig. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Géza Röhrig

Actor and poet

Géza Röhrig, a Hungarian Jewish actor and poet, played the starring role in the 2015 film Son of Saul, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, among other honors.

In Son of Saul, Röhrig portrays a Jewish prisoner who is part of an Auschwitz Sonderkommando unit, made up of victims who work in the gas chambers. One of the unit’s duties was to lie to Jews about why they were entering the gas chambers. Röhrig’s character seeks moral survival when trying to salvage from the flames the body of a boy he believes to be his son.

Rohrig, who now lives in New York, has stated that people have yet to learn from the atrocities of the Third Reich. “The cruelty exhibited there exists today,” he said, adding, “You have a feeling of insecurity about tomorrow. There’s a level of chaos because global powers do not agree on the most minimal consensus.”