Film review: The Zone of Interest

Many of us ask ourselves, “what would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow south? Or apartheid? what would i do if my country was committing genocide?”

Well the answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.

Facebook post by Aaron Bushnell, February 25 2024, hours before he self-immolated at the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC

Do you ever wonder how you’d have acted in Nazi Germany? Would you have risked ostracism, jail or even execution to help Jewish friends and neighbours? We can’t know of course but can scrutinise our past for evidence of willingness to take a moral stand at serious cost. Better yet, we can ask those who know us to make that call.

(My former spiritual teacher, Jewish as it happens, insisted we can all gain an accurate picture of who we are by asking twenty people for their take. We could choose them, he said, but it had to be not less than twenty. My teacher may or may not have been “enlightened” – and either way was flawed – but his grasp of the human condition was second to none. ¹ )

There’s something else I’ve often wondered, and it’s related. What kind of psychological space did those who made the Holocaust possible inhabit? I mean men and women like you and me; men and women who had friends round for dinner, traded gossip and had affairs, fell out over perceived slights and cheated at cards when not watering the lawn, walking the dog or fretting over hair loss and middle-age spread – then went back to the day job, killing people.

In our age the Henry Tudors and Heinrich Himmlers – ogres whose humanity we deny to reaffirm our own – are thin on the ground but their elusiveness is that of a world amok, an Azimov dystopia without the robots.

Reading the Reformation

Last night on Amazon Prime I selected my viewing. Barring the accompanying blurb, I knew nothing of The Zone of Interest  but, on the basis of said blurb and my remarks above, was prepared to give it a shot.

Here’s what I read afterwards on Wiki:

… a 2023 historical drama written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, co-produced in the UK, USA and Poland. Loosely based on a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, it focuses on the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family in a “Zone of Interest” next to the camp …

Sensational it ain’t. This is no Schindler’s List. Not a single scene affords a ringside seat at the final solution; though from time to time we do hear from beyond the wall at garden’s end the baying of attack dogs, screams cut short by gunshots and, once, an exchange between Höss and a guard he finds shouting at an inmate:

What did he do?

He was fighting another man over an apple, Herr Commandant.

Take him to the river and drown him.

Now and then we see smoke and flames and chimneys on the night sky; now and then hear the hiss and screech of trains entering that archway – no need to screen it; we’ve seen it a thousand times – for one more round of disembark and select. Otherwise the film is given over, through a snail’s pace naturalism tedious in any other context, to the domestic concerns of a couple, Herr and Frau Höss, in early middle age. Both are of lowly origin, raised beyond their wildest hopes by Rudolf’s loyalty and organisational genius. But his wife is not best pleased when his miracles at Auschwitz see him promoted to the role of supreme overseer – managing the managers, as he puts it to their Hitler Youth son – of the greater efficiency of all the camps out east.

She objects to the attendant dislocation – “we are living the dream here!”  And so they are, this is lebensraum  in action. They have exchanged stale city air for a large and luxurious house, with servants and horse pasture, fruit trees, roses and pool; all in a huge garden whose border wall with the camp Hedwig, when not hosting tea parties for ladies who a few years earlier wouldn’t have given her time of day, has artfully softened with climbing plants.

When Rudolf gets time out, the family take picnics by the river. A devoted father, he reads to his daughter at bedtime. And since Hedwig won’t go without a fight he begs high command, calls in favours, that she might stay in her Eden while he leaves to shoulder this new burden of duty for the thousand year Reich.

Fortunately for family unity, the imminent arrival at Auschwitz of 700,000 Hungarian Jews – and doubts in Berlin on Höss’s successor being up to the challenge of their cost-effective disposal – see Rudolf back with his loved ones. Back too in the job he does with such quiet mastery.

That job being so known to all of us there’s again no need to get graphic. The film relies on this. Take the scene where Hedwig, in Lady Bountiful mode, calls in her maids. Each may select a garment – just the one!  – from a pile on a drawing room table. As they leave, delighted with their gifts, their mistress jokes with friends about the servant who’d picked a pretty vest too small for her:

It belonged to a Jewess half her size. She’ll have to diet from now till Christmas!

When another servant inadvertently displeases Hedwig, she casually reminds the girl that:

My husband could have your ashes scattered across the fields.

Truth be told, Hedwig isn’t at all likeable. But other than a handful of instances like the above, where the common-or-garden abuses of authority merge seamlessly with knowledge of what happens over the wall, she’s unlikeable the way so many of us are. Above all, Frau Höss is so damned ordinary.

Which begs the question I began with. What makes us so sure we’d be any different?

Rudolf you couldn’t call ordinary – all that talent and energy! – but is undeniably human. In one scene he’s on the phone when a young woman in camp attire enters. He ignores her but, as he continues to speak into the mouthpiece, she removes her shoes and with face unreadable raises two thin white hands to pluck at the top button of her stripey gown.

Cut to him standing in a starkly utilitarian wash room. With his back to us, he lowers trousers and underwear. Taking a cloth he will discard at arm’s length, he washes groin and genitalia with the thoroughness not of sexual but racial hygiene.

This is a film about evil so banal it’s in all of us. So what will we tell tomorrow’s children, should humanity survive long enough for them to ask, what we did when holocaust came to Gaza?

* * *

1. Most of us have highly idealised images of ourselves which can happily co-exist with low self-esteem, especially when we’re in judgmental mode. Here’s my favourite illustration of that truth.

   Kremlin, February 1956: 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the first since Stalin’s death. Realising it was him or them, and with the big man’s corpse still warm, second tier leaders have had the truly frightening Beria arrested, tried and shot to leave Khrushchev in a top slot restored to first among equals. To 1500 stunned delegates – observers are excluded, while a transcript has to await Mr Gorbachev and glasnost  for publication – he speaks for four hours on ‘The Cult of Personality and its Consequences’.

   He denounces Stalin’s crimes, not least the torture and mass executions of loyal party members on risible charges, and foreign policy catastrophes (one aiding the defeat of Britain’s General Strike, another delivering Mao’s finest into the murderous hands of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang), of mass starvation by agrarian folly and needlessly high WW2 losses.

   The gobsmacked silence as Nikita takes his seat is finally broken by a lone voice at the back of the Great Hall.

   Where was Comrade Khrushchev while all this was going on? Why did he not speak out at the time?

   Khrushchev rises, face a livid mask

   Who said that?

   Silence.

   Khrushchev bides his time as the wave of fear ripples out across the cavernous hall to work its familiar magic. Then he leans into the mike, his voice a pregnant whisper.

   That’s why …