The Commandant’s Shadow
Reconciliation over coffee and cake — a beautiful moment. Despite a penchant for weird camera angles, Daniela Völker’s documentary will make you cry, gasp and shout at the screen, so be warned if you’re in a cinema. I did — I couldn’t help myself. But it’s also about personal bravery in facing up to and dealing with generational and inter-generational trauma and the weight of historical legacy.
How much can children be held culpable or responsible for their parents’ misdeeds? How much responsibility is there with children or children’s children to know, to find out, to wrestle with the past and the truth?
These are the real life people behind The Zone of Interest. We meet Hans-Jurgen Höss, who is 87 and reminisces about his beautiful childhood full of play, four siblings, a beautiful garden, swimming and boating, loving parents — particularly his father. Who runs a prison, making decisions. Only his loving family-focused father is SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss and their idyllic family home is separated by a high wall from the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Worse still his father is using his administrative genius to create the most effective of Hitler’s killing camps and overseeing the separation and murder of families, husbands and wives, children like this own. In his auto-biography his father observes how ‘the Jews’ (described scientifically as though they’re a separate inhuman species) value the family and cling together when they try to separate them. Yet this is the family which could see the crematorium from their home — it was under 200m away.
Powerfully using film footage and photographs from the camps as well as footage from the trials of Nazi war criminals after World War Two, your heart will break. Children stare out of the images bewildered as they are dumped off of trains to a fate of left or right — death by gassing or life, though this is a life of horrible pointless hard work. We see images of prisoners building their own camp — overlaid by Rudolf Höss’s complaint that they have to keep feeding the prisoners more rations because they keep dying or eating each other, and even then they’re behind schedule. Himmler doesn’t want to know — real Nazis make things happen.
Arrested and tried in Poland, Rudolf Höss writes his auto-biography. Which his son has had in his home, but never read. He remembers a beautiful childhood and family; his father’s last letter is full of love for him and his mother and family. His own son, Kai Höss, is open and as a Christian in Germany, preaches at his local church about forgiveness, guilt, shame and reconciliation with the past and its pain. Hans-Jurgen never saw anything, he says, apart from a prisoner who was trying to escape being shot. This caused him and his siblings to talk about it for a long time afterwards.
Kai and Hans-Jurgen begin a painful journey — Hans-Jurgen reads his father’s auto-biography, which decimates him emotionally. He goes to see his much-loved sister and they discuss their past. His sister, very unwell herself, seems to push the past away and almost suggest that the figures don’t add up. Why are there so many living Jews talking about all this stuff if so many died? She only wants to remember that they were loved and to appreciate her father for being strong enough to do what he did. Yet this is where truth is stranger than fiction as their mother was seemingly supported in the hard post-war times by Nazi sympathisers at points (a parcel from South America, and a visit from ‘suppliers’) and may have taken her own life by suicide capsule, given out to protect the regime from the invading Russians and Allies. She was called in to give evidence at one of the trials — and the siblings have a whole discussion about what she did or didn’t know. Knowing it seems, as history reveals she was told about her husband’s work in 1942.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was culturally Jewish — her father was an Iron Cross decorated World War One veteran, her mother a talented violinist. She and her sisters lived a happy life, until the laws and the culture started to turn against them and focus on their Jewishness to the exclusion of everything else. Bizarrely all the murder camps had music in them — to make the workers march out and to entertain the guards, to somehow make all the death palatable. Anita was the only cellist — which kept her alive. She played and played, whilst the murder and abuse went on. Surviving, she started a new life in England where no-one asked, so she didn’t tell, and kept her silence. Until now.
Her daughter, Maya, keenly feels the pressure of generational trauma and her mother’s matter-of-fact approach to life. Founding the English Chamber Orchestra, Anita rejected Germany as it stupidly rejected her and her family and only goes back when Maya sets up home in Germany. In trying to understand her mother, Maya starts a journey, visiting the site of her grandparents balconied apartment — now the place where her grandparents were transported and murdered, being sent the transcripts of the first interviews with the captured Höss, and in meeting for coffee and cake with Hans-Jurgen and Kai. They visit Auschwitz — and Hans-Jurgen crumples, realising the horror of it all. We see some of the horror too — piles of gloves, a sack of teeth, beautiful braids of hair, the endless shoes. Maya is shocked to see how close the camp is to the town, it’s not hidden. I learn what the Zone of Interest is — a set aside area used to create murder camps on a scale not seen before.
Hans-Jurgen’s frailty is contrasted with the vastness of the site as he moves around it, even returning to his old home and remembering how the rooms were furnished, the specialness of them. We’ve already seen something of that happy childhood as he impersonates a frog prince with a lost golden ball for his sister, based on the childhood game they used to play, and the sweetness between the siblings.
Much of the horror comes from the administrative efficiency of it all — the murdering was done by men not monsters. Film footage shows ordinary people in all their individuality being marched off to a train clutching suitcases and bundled up in warm clothes, and then photos show us those chosen for work groups, with shaved heads and ill-fitting clothing, the men in thin pajama like suits. Families stare out at us wondering what on earth they’ve come to? Rudolf Höss meanwhile sees all of this, the engrossed children in their game delaying following their mother into the gas chambers or a desperate mother shoving her children out of the chamber. He orders a soldier to pick the children up, carry them and put them in. He orders the children pushed back in — he even does it himself. IS it really because, as he says many times, he was just following orders? In his writings he states that his lovely family time is interrupted by thoughts of running the camp — he was planning and ‘improving’ and carrying out a hideous work.
Alongside the horror, there is beauty as Kai, Hans-Jurgen and Maya clasp hands, as cake is shared, as an overwhelmed Hans-Jurgen and Anita talk, kindly, as coffee is poured and drunk. Which is remarkable as we’ve had a brief glimpse of Anita’s trauma when she refuses to join Maya in the visit to Auschwitz, her horrified voice rising as she describes ‘my Auschwitz’ and how she wants to leave it well alone. And for Hans-Jurgen’s painful willingness to open himself to the painful, horrendous truth.
We join Kai praying, at Bible study, at his church, with his family, modelling what it means to be a different kind of man to his grandfather, as well as to face up to family history, supporting his father as he struggles with all he’s learning. Poignantly, Kai, Hans-Jurgen and Maya meet in a cafe at the last synagogue in Auschwitz, where a bustling Jewish community once was, before the killing times.
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