The following contains spoilers for “Guns & Moses.”
In a particularly harrowing scene in “Guns & Moses,” the action thriller featuring a gun-slinging Chabad rabbi played by Mark Feuerstein, Rabbi Moses “Mo” Zaltzman invites white supremacist Clay Gibbons (Jackson Dunn) to talk to a victim of the Holocaust.
Gibbons, who hounds Rabbi Zaltzman’s congregation, says: “A victim of the greatest hoax in human history.”
“Survivor,” Rabbi Zaltzman corrects him, before introducing him to an elderly congregant. The elder is Mr. Sol Fassbinder, played by the great Christopher Lloyd, the Emmy-winning actor who played “Doc” Brown in the “Back to the Future” trilogy and delighted so many TV viewers as Jim in “Taxi.”
Lloyd doesn’t appear on screen for too long. We meet him earlier in the movie as he kvetches about the heaters at a synagogue event, channeling a little of that Doc energy when he yells “turn up the heaters!” (I almost expected Michael J. Fox to jump out of the bushes!) But Feuerstein told Kveller last month, “he plays the most important role in the movie.”
Donning his Shabbat finery — a button-up shirt and a tweed jacket — and flanked by his congregation, Mr. Fassbinder tells his story.
“I lost everyone,” he starts, looking straight at Gibbons, serious, defiant. “Everyone in my town.”
“I was 10,” he continues, not breaking eye contact. “The Nazis,” he says, spitting on the ground at their mention,”they ordered all the Jews into the synagogue, my mother pushed me out of the window, I ran… I watched the Nazis light the building on fire: 509 people inside. I heard her scream until the bastards found me and threw me in a cattle train. It was so crowded. People suffocated, dead bodies, before we even got to Auschwitz.”
When they got to the concentration camp, Sol recounts, “they stripped me, shaved me, then a fat Nazi,” he says, pausing to spit on the ground once more, “with green fingers and a mole right here,” he says, touching the young man’s face to show him where, “numbered me — 112686.” He pulls up his sleeve to show Gibbons the number forever tattooed on his arm.
“I was 79 pounds when the Russians came — but I survived,” Sol concludes his tale with prideful defiance, his eyes still on Gibbons.
“Thank God,” Rabbi Zaltzman, who was standing by him, listening intently, tells Sol.
“God,” Mr. Fassbinder scoffs. “I stopped believing in him 80 years ago.”
“And yet you never miss services,” Rabbi Mo says with a fond smile.
“I just come from the brownies,” Mr. Fassbinder replies, finally breaking that serious facade, smiling sweetly back at his rabbi.
“He’s a legend,” Feuestein told Kveller of acting next to Llyod. “When he tells this neo-Nazi, not only did the Holocaust exist, but I lost my whole family. It’s such an important scene, because watching the human interaction between the two of them — watching him educate someone who would deny that the Holocaust happened. Seeing that boy’s face take it in, changes [Rabbi Mo],” Feurstein said of the scene.
Lloyd has given many iconic performances in his long and storied career, yet I would argue his performance in this small but oh-so-significant role — that of Holocaust survivor Sol Fassbinder — might be one his very best.
