Zone of Interest

I steeled myself to go to see the Jonathan Glazer production of 'Zone of Interest' which portrays the life of KL Camp Kommandant Rudolf Höss and his family in their apparently idyllic house set against the walls of Auschwitz. Martin Amis wrote a similar story and Glazer decided to tell it with the actual people instead of the anonymity of the fictional version. 

There's the bucolic and well-tended garden with trimmed grass, pretty flowers and a swimming pool slowly revealing that beyond the wall is the industrialised mass murder of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Höss is senior commander of the entire operation and even gets promoted back to Berlin to oversee a whole set of these camps. The family declines to follow, preferring their luxurious lifestyle outside of the Auschwitz camp.

The language is matter of fact as the family behaves typically with their assorted children, pet dog, numerous servants and workmen. They are largely insulated from the Konzentrationslager as their nearest neighbour, growing vines up the camp walls. The terrifying soundscape tells the story of what is within these walls. Although the movie is in German language, the stark sounds already tell too much.  Pistolshot, echoing rifle shots, screams, and the interminable grinding, smoke, cries and metallic groans from the heavy machinery of industrial slaughter. Black smoke rising and ash coating the flowers causing the visiting mother to quietly depart overnight. Mercifully Glazer doesn't show us inside the active camp.

We see Höss rising to power, first a promotion to Berlin, then to take proud control of the mass extermination of Hungarian prisoners - another excited promotion relayed by phone from Berlin to his wife still at the house in Auschwitz.

In his Nuremburg Trial affidavit made on 5 April 1946, Höss stated:

'I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from The Netherlands, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

Not included in the movie...

Nazi evacuation and evidence destruction took place leaving approximately 7,000 prisoners in the camp. On January 27, 1945. Red Army soldiers entered Oświęcimand and soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front appeared on the grounds of the Monowitz sub-camp, on the eastern side of the city. They liberated the Auschwitz Main Camp and Birkenau at about 3 p.m.

...And yes, sadly the wall can be a metaphor for now.