- Born
- Height6′ (1.83 m)
- Géza Röhrig was born on May 11, 1967 in Budapest, Hungary. He is an actor, known for Son of Saul (2015), Marty Supreme (2025) and To Dust (2018).
- The actor had come to the Los Angeles Film Festival together with the film's director. After the screening, a member of the audience came up to Röhrig and asked him whether he would like to meet a real former member of the Sonderkommando. "There's one who lives several blocks from here," the man said. "Of course I want to meet him," Röhrig replied. Soon he was sitting with Dario Gabbai, who was deported with his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Of the appr. 2200 prisoners who were forced to work in the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, only about 90 to 110 survived the war. The Nazis usually killed most of them after a few months because they were eyewitnesses to the genocide, and would then replace them with new arrivals. Gabbai is believed to be the last remaining today. [Haaretz 2016].
- In February 2016, the New Yorker reported that before, during, and after filming Son of Saul, Géza Röhrig was employed as a shomer in a funeral home in Manhattan. In Jewish funereal ritual, a shomer is a person who sits with a body so that it is not left alone before a funeral; Röhrig's job also included participating in the ritual washing of the bodies before burial. The article said that when Röhrig started this job (in 2001), his salary was $10.00 an hour.
- He published two collections of poems on the theme of the Shoah, "Hamvasztókönyv" (literally "Book of Incineration", 1995) and "Fogság" ("Captivity", 1997).
- Lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife and four children.
- But it wasn't God who rounded up the Jews and the Gypsies and the Soviet PoWs and the gays and the perfectly German mental patients and the perfectly German midgets and slaughtered them. We did it. The human family did it. I do not for one nanosecond like to pretend that God is off the hook. He could and should have stopped it at a much earlier stage. But I would not be able to get up from my bed in the morning, let alone pray, if I didn't fully believe that God somehow was there holding the hands of each and every Jew in the gas chamber - each and every Tutsi, Armenian, Kurd, Israeli, Palestinian who suffers unjustly. [2015]
- I just needed someone to talk to. I think there is a side of us that we can't share even with the ones we love, and that side has to be aired. It has to be communicated. So I talk to somebody. And I call that somebody God. [2015]
- I gave up thinking that society is anything other than an abstraction long ago. You have different societies in every country. But whichever group you belong to, you're never exempt from taking a side when it comes to crimes against humanity. That's true in Syria and America and Israel and everywhere. Every day, we all have to make a case-by-case evaluation: is this an important enough demonstration to go on? Is this where I should send my money? Is this a petition I should sign? I do not believe in living in an apolitical ivory tower. One of the lessons of 1944 lies with the bystanders - we can't just let things happen. [2015]
- Consumer society targets your senses and threatens thinking entirely. 'Why aren't you laughing? There is so much fun! Why don't you try this cake or that Coke?' [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] I am not [the character] Saul. But I know that as a member of the Sonderkommando, he's as much a victim as anyone else, if not more so. He's been dehumanized by his circumstances, as has everyone else there. He doesn't know all of what is going on; he's just struggling to survive. [2015]
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content
