MOVIE REVIEW: ZONE OF INTEREST

 

   "WORK SETS YOU FREE"

I WATCHED a movie last night called “Zone of Interest”. It’s a Polish/UK drama based on true events depicting the lives of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss. Rudolf was the longest serving commandant of Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration/death camp, during WWII. The film is an odd venture as it is set almost entirely in the zone of interest around Auschwitz, which were lands reserved for the Schutzstaffel (SS) and their families, as well as for agriculture production and experimental farming. Auschwitz is the name Germans gave to the Polish town of Oswiecim, after they conquered Poland, which is located 50 kilometres west of Krakow near the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers. A former army barracks, it started out after 1940 as a POW detention site, but its central location, nearby rail hub and fresh water supply made it an ideal setting for an expanded network of camps, extermination facilities, and barracks for forced labour at nearby agriculture and industrial enterprises. For example, the German chemical giant I.G. Farben* built a synthetic rubber plant there specifically to take advantage of the massive influx of detainees after 1940.

Birkenau is a name associated with Auschwitz. It was the “sub-camp” facility (“Auschwitz-II”) where most of the executions and cremations were carried out, though Auschwitz also had crematoria. Auschwitz-Birkenau was one of five Nazi extermination camps established in Central Europe where mass executions were carried out using gas. This procedure was deemed more efficient than shooting, hanging, etc. Auschwitz has the distinction for being the largest such facility. In all, there were more than 40 sub-camps in the area associated with “Auschwitz-1”.

 

IN THE MOVIE, we do not have scenes inside the camp proper, even though the camp is literally a stone’s throw from Commandant Höss’s⁺ backyard, in which his wife Hedwig gardens constantly even putting up flowering vines “to hide the wall” between their world and that of the camp. Though we can hear what goes on next door, the shouts, screams, conversations, occasional gunfire, and the hiss of roaring furnaces form a background soundscape, distant, almost dream-like, subliminal, yet always present. Incidentally, Zone won 2024’s Oscar for best soundtrack—there is little music scored for the movie—and the sounds representing the unseen world next door were meticulously curated for the film. In a strange way you’re almost ‘bored’ with next door, and it is sometimes possible to forget it’s even there as you watch the children playing in the swimming pool, or adults laughing and joking at Rudolf’s birthday party. It’s only when you look over the wall and barrack roofs and see drifting in the wind smoke from the crematoria that you remember, and you wonder how it is possible you forgot in the first place.¹ 

 

The Höss household is a busy one. With five children it’s no wonder! We watch the children as they are scrubbed and dressed and eat their breakfast and are whisked out the front door to school, if they are of age. The younger ones play in the backyard or are coddled in basinets. Busy, busy! Women doing chores—cooking, scrubbing floors, laundry, darning socks. There is order and precision as they perform their duties. Soon you realize, besides German neighbor-wives dropping by for coffee klatches or Hedwig’s mother visiting, that most are prisoners seconded from the camp. And through the household’s busyness, by attending to details, to routines—by rushing about getting things done—that is how what happens beyond the wall can be forgotten, ignored.

IT'S ONLY WHEN the household orderliness is disrupted, for example by an argument between Rudolf and Hedwig and a spill not cleaned up yet, that the mask slips: Hedwig, at breakfast and between bites, reprimands one of her slave-servants saying she could have her husband “spread your ashes over my azaleas.” It’s a chilling statement from someone who holds the power of life and death over the camp women who work in her house. The young woman, whose life Hedwig so casually threatens, rushes from the kitchen to attend to the spill. Here, the two worlds—home and camp—intersect and a place once thought safe and harmonious in an instant becomes a minefield.

 

ANOTHER EXAMPLE occurs when Rudolf takes his children swimming in the nearby river. As they splash about, we see a flow of cloudy water moving downstream toward them. It is ash from the camp’s crematoria released into the river and Rudolf runs quickly to grab his two young children from the water. Later, the children are bathed, and Rudolf cleans himself off, noting some bone cremains left in the sink basin. All done. All clean. It’s back to ‘normal’ now.

SCENES in the household between Rudolf and Hedwig reflect a happy marriage, as are scenes between parents and children. Of course, their tranquil family life is based on a façade, a brittle veneer of lies and deceit, but as long as they ignore what goes on beyond the wall ‘next door’, their domestic idyll remains intact. But when, with the passage of time and events, reality once more comes knocking and Rudolf tells Hedwig they must move because he is being transferred, Hedwig is adamant that she and the children remain behind in the home they have worked so hard to build. Hedwig later reminds Rudolf they live a life that, without Rudolf’s position in the SS, they could never afford, and she looks forward to “when the war is over” and they can buy a farm. Their self-delusion is monstrous.

It's an important film to watch no matter how disturbing the content may be.

 

👉AND what is happening today in Palestine, in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, is the product of a similar mind set, the same delusions. Israelis can ignore what they and their government are doing to the Palestinian people. And as long as Palestinians remain behind walls and barbwire, Israelis are free to ignore the common humanity each side shares with the other. It is a tragedy every day, with the death toll set to rise as the displaced population starves, as children die of starvation directly through the actions of the Israeli military. (And shamefully, with the complicity of the United States and many of its allies, including Canada.) And even more deaths are to come when the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) decides to enter Rafah in force in the coming days and weeks. It is a genocide they are committing--a crime against humanity and international law, the consequences of which will be felt for generations to come. There must be a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of IDF troops from Palestinian land now. Free Palestine.

 

Jake.______________________________________

 

* The same chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that gave the world synthetic aspirin from its Bayer subsidiary also produced the pesticide Zyklon-B which, infamously, was used at Auschwitz to murder an estimated one million Jews, along with tens of thousands of ethnic Poles, Romas, Russian POWs, Czechs, Belorussians, and other groups. It is thought that 2.7 million Jews were killed in such “killing centres” during WWII. An additional three million Jews were murdered by other means during this time, including from disease, starvation, pogroms, forced marches and violence. 

 

+ Rudolf Höss was found guilty of the mass murder of 3.5 million people at Auschwitz and other death camps he organized during the war. At his trial, he disputed that number saying: “No. Only two and one half million—the rest died from disease and starvation.” During the war, he oversaw experiments on prisoners using different kinds of poisons to find one suitable for his plans of mass extermination. He settled on Zyclon-B which killed rapidly, with prisoners exposed to the gas dying in five to 15 minutes. He said in his written Nurenberg testimony: “We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped.” [Note: Auschwitz was where Doctor Mengele conducted his horrific medical experiments on camp inmates. He evaded custody and fled to Argentina. When discovered by authorities and Israeli intelligence operatives, he emigrated under an assumed name first to Paraguay then Brazil where he died of a stroke while swimming at the age of 69.  Ed.] 

Höss was tried and hanged for his crimes on 16 April 1947 at Auschwitz before an audience of around 100 people, many of whom were former inmates.

 

1. An interesting scene occurs with the visit of Hedwig’s mother who remarks on how modern and clean their home is, how healthy her grandchildren are, how beautiful Hedwig’s garden is. And as they walk around the garden, Hedwig’s mother timidly asks if that’s the camp beyond the garden wall. It’s like someone asking something not normally mentioned in polite company, something disreputable and distasteful. Hedwig acknowledges it is and then continues showing her mother the rest of her garden. Later that night, as her mother sleeps in an upstairs bedroom, she is awakened by a sound and sees her curtains glowing a deep red. She goes to the window and looks out over the camp to see flames roaring from the crematoria chimneys. The next morning, we learn she has left early, not saying goodbye, just leaving a note for Hedwig who reads it then tosses it in the garbage.

 

2. Throughout the movie there are scenes of a girl riding a bicycle to what looks like a series of earth works or compost heaps. She appears to be placing apples in a row among the piles of earth. It is filmed through a dark red filter, almost like reverse-negative photography, and I took it for some kind of dream sequence. I was puzzled by it until I read an account of a 12-year-old member of the Polish resistance who would ride her bicycle at night to the agricultural sector in the zone of interest and do just that—hide apples for the prisoners to find and eat. Her name was Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk. Interestingly, Aleksandra found a piece of music written by Joseph Wulf, a camp inmate who survived his ordeal.

 

 

      

 

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