The Zone of Interest: 1944 or 2024?

My thoughts on the relevance of this Academy Award-winning historical drama

Photo by Lāsma Artmane on Unsplash

The Zone of Interest, the British-American-Polish film that received the 2023 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, begins with a four-minute-long black screen and a wordless, rising and falling chorus of echo-like voices underscored with haunting music that turns into birdsong just before the screen opens onto a family gathered for an relaxing outing and a swim in the lake. The summer scene is idyllic, harmonious and innocent until we realize that the home to which the family of SS Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and camp commander, Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their five young children return through the woods is located right next to the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The film derives its impact from the stark contrast between the Höss family’s normal, albeit privileged, everyday life in a modern, two-story house equipped with a central heating system (the first thing they had installed for comfort during the cold winter) and the adjacent complex where industrial slaughter goes on day and night. Beyond a high wall, all they see of the concentration camp is a guard tower and a constantly spewing smokestack. While the children play, mother Hedwig supervises the domestic staff or chats over coffee with other German officers’ wives, and father Rudolf works long hours, we hear shouting, screams, gun shots, dogs barking and the constant dull roar of crematoriums in the background.

Hedwig, the Queen of Auschwitz, is happy with her life. When her mother comes to visit, she takes her on a tour of the beautiful vegetable, herb and flower garden complete with greenhouse. “Es ist wunderschön (it is beautiful),” she boasts, “ein Paradies (a paradise)”. When her husband informs her of rumours that he might be transferred, she does not want to leave. This is their home, she insists, the home they’ve always dreamed of, even better. They are living the way the Führer said Germans should live, and it is worth every sacrifice (although she never mentions who is making that ultimate sacrifice). Hedwig is blissfully blind to all but her own and her family’s comfort and benefit, two examples of which are the beautiful confiscated fur coat that she tries on in front of a mirror and the jewellery that she puts in a box on her dressing table.

The Zone of Interest is not your typical Hollywood movie about the Holocaust. We see no overtly evil, sadistic Germans, in fact, they all appear upright and self-controlled, almost mechanical. Nor do we see any heroic, suffering Jews; the only Jew in the movie (I’m assuming that the gardener, nanny and female domestic servants are Polish forced labourers) is the skinny young woman who comes to Höss’s office for sexual services. This is only suggested when he goes down to the basement laundry to wash himself before going home to his wife. Unlike his wife and family, Höss is directly involved in what goes on behind the walls of the camp. In one scene, he listens in a calm, cold and detached manner to the two men who, dressed like insurance salesmen in business suits, explain in precise technical detail how the efficient, new gas chambers will incinerate and reduce the “Ladung” (payload) to disposable ashes. No mention is made of humans, people or victims.

At the end of the film, Höss attends an urgent conference of the Nazi officials in charge of all concentrations camps, and presents a five-phase organizational plan to deal with the 700,000 Hungarian Jews who will be deported 12,000 per train 4 times a day. When Höss learns from a superior officer that instead of being transferred, he is charged with finishing the job at Auschwitz, he tell his wife when he calls to give her the good news that “Ehrlich gesagt, ich freue mich, wie ein Schneekönig” (to be honest, I’m tickled pink). Later in the evening, Höss calls his wife again to proudly announce that SS Reichsführer Himmler has named the operation Aktion Höss after him. When she asks him who was at the evening social event, he tells her that he was too pre-occupied with the logistics of gassing the Hussars to pay any attention. In the final scene, Höss leaves the grandiose building where the social is being held, and stops at the foot of the stairs to throw up on the floor, presumably not because he must oversee mass murder, but because he is under immense pressure to get the job done in a very short period. The only time he shows any human emotion in the film is in the brief scene where he plays affectionately with a small dog that its owner is walking in a park in Berlin.

Though the story takes place in 1944, it could very easily be happening right now in a settler colony in the West Bank or neighbouring Gaza to an Israeli family living in their paradise on stolen land. In this version, the father would be a high-ranking IDF officer who kisses his wife and young children good-bye before going off to strategize on how to ethnically cleanse Gaza of human animals and destroy Hamas. It could be the story of any Western political leader who leaves his/her family after breakfast to attend the next legislative session where additional weapons shipments are authorized for Israel’s war machine. This story could be happening right now to any one of us who, despite the thousands of kilometers between us and Gaza, carry on our normal, daily lives in a state of oblivious indifference to the Palestinian children, women, the elderly and disabled, unarmed men who are being systematically murdered, injured, terrorized and displaced. Out of sight, out of mind. As long as everything is good in “my” world, everything is good everywhere else.

Although we associate evil with cruelty, sadism and psychopathy, evil cannot be isolated from the conditions under which it is allowed to thrive: general apathy, depraved indifference, emotional detachment from the suffering of others, and elevated self-interest. When ordinary people hermetically seal themselves off in their own little “paradise”, evil takes root and spreads.

During her observations of the trail of Adolf Eichmann, historian-philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to “a manifest shallowness in the doer which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ‒ at least the very effective one now on trial ‒ was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” She called this phenomenon “the banality of evil”.

As we watch the Höss family in The Zone of Interest, we cannot help but ask how could they live like that. But do we not need more urgently and honestly to ask the same question of ourselves?

Footnote 1: The only recipient to speak out at the Oscars ceremony on March 10, director Jonathan Glazer was attacked by the Anti-Defamation League, among others, for his mild acceptance speech:

All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?

Executive producer and co-financier Danny Cohen rejected Glazer’s speech as a “distraction from a great work of art” that upset and angered many people. One week later, an open letter signed by 450 Jewish Hollywood professionals condemned Glazer for using the word, occupation, “to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years” and fuelling growing antisemitism around the world.

Footnote 2: I’ve noticed the recent addition of documentaries and movies about Auschwitz on Netflix. Is this done, I wonder, to overshadow and minimize the crimes Israel is committing against the Palestinians in Gaza by focusing attention on the Holocaust?

(The beauty of writing on Substack is that readers can have their say as well. Because I am one small voice, I invite you to add your own knowledge, expertise, experiences and thoughts in the comments.)