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Ever since Alain Resnais first addressed the subject in the mid-1950s, several films over more recent decades have concerned the Holocaust. Some of these pictures have tried realistically to depict the horror of the extermination camps. Others, like Schindler’s List or most recently The Tattooist of Auschwitz, have told the stories of those being saved or the lucky ones who survived, set against the backdrop of the horror, but ending on an upbeat note. All of these approaches raise problems. How can modern, well-fed actors suggest the appalling nature of starvation and brutality that was at the centre of camp life? How can scenes shot in a modern studio with today’s sensibilities ever do justice to the dreadful scale of industrial genocide carried out by the Nazis? And does making an optimistic film about the camps allow the viewer to overlook the awfulness of the lives of those condemned to the daily atrocities that took place in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, or any of the other death camps?
The Zone of Interest takes an entirely new approach. There is not a single scene that depicts the violence of life in Auschwitz. Instead, we see the regular domesticities of a wealthy German family going about their daily business. It is the Höss family, and the head of the household, Rudolf, is commandant of the camp. Over the wall of this residence is Auschwitz-Birkenau. We see the watchtowers in the distance. We get glimpses of the chimneys belching smoke from mass ovens where thousands of bodies are being burned. At night, the camp glows as the fires rage continuously. But it is left entirely to our imagination and to previous knowledge we have about Auschwitz to suggest the indescribable horror of genocide that is going on there.
Jonathan Glazer has written and directed this film. He has only directed a few other movies, but they have all been unusual and distinctive, including Sexy Beast (2000) and Under the Skin (2013). He has also directed many award-winning pop videos and several TV ads, including the Levi’s Jeans ‘Odyssey ad’. Glazer very loosely based The Zone of Interest on the book of the same name by Martin Amis, published in 2014. But like other Glazer adaptations, he has moved on from the book, with its interpersonal three-way relationships, into something more grand and certainly very much more cinematic. Filming took place in 2021 around Auschwitz. Although the film is a British-Polish co-production, all the actors are German, and the dialogue is in German throughout.
The real star of the film is the audio track created by Johnnie Burn. Throughout all the scenes of everyday domestic normality, we hear the sounds generated by Auschwitz. We hear distant but terrible screams, indistinct orders being shouted, ovens roaring, guns firing, unknown machinery whirring. It all creates the dreadful, never-ceasing rumble of genocide. Burn spent 18 months researching Auschwitz, reading the memoirs of survivors (many of whom described the sounds of the place, such as the hum of the electric fences) and putting together his sound design. Burn deservedly won this year’s Oscar for Best Sound (along with sound mixer Tarn Willers) in recognition of his achievement.
Banality of evil
The film begins with a long-held black screen. Slowly the sounds of Auschwitz rise up. This film will be as much about what you hear as what you see.
Every day, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) gets up, has breakfast with his wife and five children, and goes to work, where he oversees the murder of literally thousands of camp inmates. Then he comes home in the evening and reads his children a bedtime story before having dinner with his wife. According to his children, interviewed decades later, Höss was a good and loving father. It is the sheer normality of his domestic life, contrasted with the dreadful crimes being committed on the other side of the camp wall, that is at the heart of this film. And it is this contrast that gives a new and powerful cinematic meaning to Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, ‘the banality of evil’.
Höss’s wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) is obsessed with her garden. She proudly shows it off to friends and to her mother who visits. She spends hours planting and tending the colourful flowers, which are beautifully laid out, a mini paradise. When it is suggested that her husband might be promoted and sent to Berlin, she pleads with him to argue that she and her family should be allowed to stay at Auschwitz. She is completely and totally unphased by the mass murder that is taking place only a few yards from her beloved garden. She can delight in listening to the birds but not hear the sounds of killing. She is able to shut her eyes and ears completely to the genocide that is taking place just over the wall.
There is no question that the family knows what is going on in the camp. In one scene, Hedwig and a group of female friends receive a basket of clothes that have been stolen from those about to be killed. Hedwig tries on a fur coat and shows great delight at the trinkets she takes. The others help themselves to silk underwear and smart dresses. They totally block out the idea that the people who once wore these expensive garments have been cruelly murdered.
Some night scenes are shot in infrared and show a young Polish girl from a nearby village stealing apples from the Höss house and burying them in the area where Auschwitz prisoners will be sent to work. It is the only act of kindness shown in the film.
Chilling scenes
One particular scene brilliantly captures the polarity of The Zone of Interest. One of Rudolph Höss’s young sons is playing with his toy soldiers. Outside his playroom window, we hear shouts as a prisoner is caught fighting with another over the apples they have discovered. As a punishment, the guards drown him in the nearby river. As his screams multiply, the son goes to the window and looks out. We don’t see what he sees. We only hear it. The boy walks back into the playroom and says to himself: ‘Better not do that again.’ But what is he referring to? Is he metaphorically talking to the prisoner who is being murdered as a punishment for his ‘crime’? Or, more likely, is he talking to himself, saying that he really must not look out of the window and peer into the atrocities being committed on the other side of the wall?
In another scene, a group of architects and engineers arrive to consult with Höss. They have found a more efficient way of burning the bodies. By the summer of 1944, the arrival of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews posed a problem for the Auschwitz authorities. They simply could not cope with the numbers being murdered every day. The gas chambers were producing more corpses than the four crematoria could dispose of. Höss is delighted by the idea of a structure that could burn more bodies more quickly. But it is as though these middle-class architects are planning a simple garden-room extension with a client. Again, it is the matter-of-factness that is shocking. And it gives the lie to the idea claimed by so many Germans after the war that they had no idea what was going on in the extermination camps. The process of genocide involved thousands.
In the latter part of The Zone of Interest, Höss is sent to Berlin. He leaves the camp where genocide is being carried out to work with those who are planning the mass murder. But he is never happy in this role. He gets ill with an unspecified medical issue. He leaves a glitzy party where the SS bigwigs congratulate themselves on the success of their genocide policy. He stumbles down a stairwell, and looks down a long corridor with light at the end of it.
Then the film suddenly switches to scenes of the Auschwitz museum today. The ovens are being cleaned; the gas chambers are swept. Curators and janitors are preparing to open the museum to the public. There is a long corridor lined with the photos of those who have been murdered in the camp. The film ends in documentary mode. Does Höss in some way see this? Does he see how his crimes will be remembered 80 years later? Does he care?
The real Rudolf Höss was arrested by British soldiers in 1946, having disguised himself as a gardener. He gave evidence at Nuremberg, and was put on trial by the Polish authorities for war crimes in 1947. He was hanged for his leading role in carrying out the Holocaust, and his public execution took place inside Auschwitz camp. Hedwig started a new life, remarried, and lived near Stuttgart. She died in 1989, aged 81.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2024)
Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer.
Produced by James Wilson and Ewa Puszczynska.
Sound design by Johnnie Burn.
Starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller.
A Film 4/Polish Film
Institute co-production distributed by A24.
THE HOLOCAUST ON FILM
The first filmic treatment of the Holocaust was by the French director Alain Resnais in Night and Fog (1956), made ten years after the liberation of the camps. The film includes colour footage of the remains of Auschwitz, and black-and-white archival film and stills. The commentary, written by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of Mauthausen camp, tells of the plight of the camps’ inmates in harrowing detail. The film had an immense impact at the time of its release, and it is still highly regarded today.
The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1964) was the first major American film about the Holocaust. Rod Steiger plays a survivor who runs a pawn shop in Harlem, but suffers from terrible flash-backs to his days in the camps. In 1978, the NBC television series Holocaust did much to make the story of the Nazi genocide well known in America and in Germany, despite being criticised by survivors for factual inaccuracies.
Sophie’s Choice (Alan Pakula, 1982) is an intense psychodrama in which Meryl Streep plays Sophie, a Polish immigrant to the United States, who hides a terrible secret of the choice she had to make on being sent to Auschwitz with her children.
Probably the most famous Holocaust movie is Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). Spielberg had the rights to Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark for ten years before he felt he was mature enough to make a film about the Holocaust. The film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson (pictured above), a Czech businessman who sets up a factory in Krakow using Jewish workers whom he hires from the SS simply because they were cheaper than local Polish workers.
Initially, Schindler’s only interest was to make as much money as possible. But, over the years, he begins to take an interest in his Jewish workforce and ends up saving about 1,100 Jews by bribing Nazi officials to allow him to take them to another factory near his hometown in the Sudetenland. The film does not avoid the horrors of the Holocaust, with painful scenes of the deportation of Jews from the Kraków ghetto and Ralph Fiennes’ depiction of the brutal and sadistic commandant of a concentration camp at Płaszów.
The popular box office success of the film may be attributed to the fact that, at the end, it has a feelgood factor, like most Spielberg films, despite covering such a dark subject. Spielberg went on to set up the Shoah Foundation in California to film the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust and other more recent genocides. So far, more than 56,000 victims have had their stories recorded for posterity.
Other films over the past 20 years include HBO’s Conspiracy (Frank Pierson, 2001), which re-enacts in real time the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when SS leaders and Nazi officials took about 90 minutes to decide on the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish ‘problem’. Kenneth Branagh plays Reinhard Heydrich and Stanley Tucci is Adolf Eichmann. The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002) tells the story of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2010) is an entirely fictional film about the roundup of French Jews. A host of other movies of this period includes The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008), Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015), and The Secrets We Keep (Yuval Adler, 2020).
Of the many powerful television and film documentaries made about the Holocaust, the first was in the 20th episode of Thames TV’s epic series The World at War, entitled ‘Genocide’ (Mike Darlow, 1973). This featured interviews with SS veterans, as well as Holocaust survivors. More recently, there have been many memorable documentaries, among them Into the Arms of Strangers (Mark Jonathan Harris, 2000) about the Kindertransport; the BBC’s Auschwitz: the Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (Laurence Rees, 2005); and Night Will Fall (Andre Singer, 2014), which explores the making of a British documentary about the camps in 1945. Many of these documentaries feature the testimony of survivors who are now dead.
The most recent depiction of the Holocaust is The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Tall Shalom Ezer; available on Sky TV from May 2024). The series of six films is based on the bestselling book by Heather Morris, which described a true love story between Lali, a Slovakian Jew, one of those who tattooed all new arrivals with a number, and Gita, another inmate (pictured below). The book was heavily criticised for historical inaccuracies. The film-makers were consequently obsessive in getting the detail of the camp reconstruction as accurate as possible. During the course of a long 83-day shoot in their pretend Auschwitz set, many of the cast and crew members needed counselling because of the intensity and horror of the experience.
The series has again been criticised for depicting inmates in an unrealistic way: too well-fed, too clean, and the brutality too tame. Leading actor Jonah Hauer-King, who plays Lali, has said the filming, which involved having his head shaved and putting on the Auschwitz striped costume each day, was ‘incredibly upsetting’. Despite this, he said, ‘we all had the privilege of being able to go home every day’.
Most of these movies and series prove how difficult it is to portray the terror and violence of the Holocaust in an honest and authentic way. That is why, by avoiding any direct scenes of violence, The Zone of Interest is so unusual and so chilling.
Images: www.themoviedb.org
