Sunbeams, radiant and warm. Human bodies, young and old. And who are imprisoned here, our hearts are yet not cold. We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night, souls afire, like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.
– from “Sunbeams” by Joseph Wulf, written at Auschwitz, translated from the original Yiddish
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In 1944, Operation Höss began in Hungary, a systematic deportation of some 800,000 Hungarian Jews by train to Auschwitz, a concentration camp built in the verdant countryside of occupied Poland. Eighty percent would be gassed or burned on arrival, while the remaining deemed healthy enough to work would function as forced laborers. Amongst those left to carry the shovels was my own grandfather who, save for one other relative, would be the only one of his siblings, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, or cousins to survive. In his stories and in his memories are the images I’ve spent my entire life trying, and failing, to imagine faithfully: the dirt and soot, the ovens and the showers, the single scrap of bread or bowled puddle of soup given daily. Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece of idyllic suspense, The Zone of Interest, offered me little additional imagery of the camps themselves, but their nauseating proximity to the figures at the center of the film created an unease far greater than any fictional representation could have achieved.
The film is based loosely on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, as well as the very real lives of commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, in her second performance of unnerving domesticity this year, following her turn as a wife accused of murdering her husband in Anatomy of a Fall). In its presentation of their domestic dramas, captured remotely with oft-hidden cameras by Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, we see them celebrate birthdays, play in the pool or by the lake, and tend to their thriving garden of flowers and nutrient-rich vegetables. Only when the camera lets us glimpse the rows of barbed wire atop the gray slate walls, or the plumes of black smoke from the crematorium chimneys, are we forced to imagine what’s beyond them.
Instead, the horror is manifested first not by the indifference but rather the joyousness of the Hösses and their five small children. In one such moment we see Frau Höss’s glowing pride as she strolls through her many-colored blooms and laughingly tells her mother that they call her “the Queen of Auschwitz.” Many of these scenes are cast in warm natural light, as if to further separate their familial bliss from the darkest of human suffering. In a later scene, when Rudolf is promoted and set to be transferred, Hedwig protests her family leaving that most beautiful place. She tells him that they’ve already gone east and found their living space, referring to Hitler directly and alluding to the back-to-nature Lebensreform movement, which the Nazis had co-opted and used as a core justification of their invasions and genocides: that the German people needed Lebensraum (“living space”) to breathe, literally and figuratively, to preserve their history and their future. It’s no coincidence that the real-life Rudolph Höss had gained his high-ranking position after the Artaman League, an interwar blood-and-soil agrarian movement fixated on these ideas, was absorbed into the Nazi Party along with its leading members, including Höss, as well as Heinrich Himmler, the man known now as the dominant architect of the Holocaust.
The second and far more horrifying manifestation of the ever-looming evil beyond the wall comes from the film’s soundscape, anchored and occasionally pierced by Mica Levi’s vicious score, which sets itself like a dog unseen in the dark, growling, barking, threatening to bite and never let go. Most of the film goes without it, though, choosing instead to bloody the air with the actual sounds of barking dogs, as well as the screams of human beings and the peppering of gunshots. We can hear them, and unlike hearing a person scream in the distance in real life, here you can’t react. You’re held, still as the static sun-soaked photographs on-screen, unable to do anything but look at the foliage and try not to let the emaciated bodies piling in an unseen field sink into your mind’s eye.
In one of the most unsettling juxtapositions of sound and image, we’re shown macro-lensed images of flowers, one by one, perfect floral portraits, as the curdling screech of what sounds like children in pain creeps in and the screen fades to bright red, where it holds. Mica Levi’s score punctures through in a couple of jutting bursts, and we’re held against this red screen for several more moments before suddenly being returned to the perfectly curated interiors of the Höss family home.
The film also holds room for moments of counterbalance, such as the one involving Joseph Wulf’s “Sunbeams,” a song written by Wulf while he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and smuggled out via memory. In the film, the sheet music is discovered by a local Polish girl who works at the Höss residence. We watch her sneaking out and hiding apples behind the laborer’s shovels, where she finds the folded bit of paper. She brings the sheet music home and plays it on the piano, and for a moment we hear Wulf’s actual voice, from a recording he made in the late ‘60s while attempting to preserve other Yiddish songs. A slow rendition unfolds as the words, translated from Yiddish and subtitled in gold, play out on the screen. This is the only real Jewish voice centered in the film, and the only moment offering any enduring hopefulness, waiting for the flags of freedom yet to come.
The Hösses’ lives continue to preserve their status quo, broken only by brief scenes of dissonance: of Hedwig’s mother leaving in the night after displaying her disgust at the burning crematorium chimneys seen, and assumedly smelled, through her open bedroom window; of a female prisoner shown entering Rudolf’s office and removing her shoes, after which, in a tunneled washroom otherwise unseen in the film, Höss pulls his semi-formal trousers to his thighs and proceeds to wash his genitals. The only other deviation is the footage of the aforementioned apple girl, which Glazer shoots in an eerie form of night-vision color reversal as she collects the fruit and sneaks past the camp’s trespassing signs to hide them for the slave-laborers. Later in the film we will overhear the orders for an execution of two prisoners, for fighting over an apple.
Eventually, Rudolf Höss is transferred to Oranienburg, outside Berlin, where he will become the deputy inspector of all camps, as well as a leading voice in the organization of the Holocaust’s next grand predatory movement: the deportation of at least 700,000 Jews from Hungary. This ultimately will take him back home to Auschwitz, where the real-life Höss continued to live until the end of the war when, at Himmler’s urging, he fled and went into hiding. Until he was found and arrested by German Jewish Nazi hunters, Höss would live his last free days disguised and working as a gardener.
Rudolf’s promotion obviously can’t come before a lavish party is thrown, during which Höss wanders off and finds a phone to call his wife and tell her the good news: the Hungarian deportation and extermination program will be named after him, after them: Operation Höss. His pride is gushing and his wife is indifferent, even annoyed at his late call. He admits he spent the party distracted, wondering how logistically he would gas a room with such high ceilings – the real Höss of course being the man who first introduced and deployed the poisonous Zyklon-B on prisoners at Auschwitz. Hedwig tells him to sleep and ends the call, after which he walks down into an ominously dark staircase, retches a couple of times though doesn’t vomit, and then stares into the abyss of an unlit hallway.
Here the film takes a surprising temporal jump, showing us the cleaning and vacuuming of the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum. Signs are put up, the floors are vacuumed, the glass displays housing the piles of shoes recovered in 1945 are polished to perfect clarity. A shot framing countless sets of children’s shoes is shown.
It was here that I was struck by the mundane acts it takes to preserve this collective and collected memory of the Holocaust. I thought about the daily maintenance of all the Holocaust memorials and museums erected in the last 70 some-odd years, of all the carpets vacuumed and glass displays sprayed and wiped. I thought about the history of Holocaust cinema, of Alain Resnais wandering the overgrown grounds of the abandoned camps as he made Night and Fog; of every gaffer, grip, or extra on the set of Schindler’s List, standing around on a soundstage, perhaps even stealing an apple from craft services between takes; of Jonathan Glazer’s nearly 10 years of research leading him through the Auschwitz Museum archives, which in turn led him to Alexandria, the then-90 year old Polish woman who, as a 12-year-old member of the resistance, used to hide apples for the starving prisoners and really did find that piece of music by Joseph Wulf. I learned later that the dress and the bike used in the film belonged to the real Alexandria, and I learned that Joseph Wulf jumped from his 5th-floor Berlin apartment window in 1974. In his last letter to his son he wrote:
I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death. . . . Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.
I think about my own grandfather, who is 94 years old now, and who, after surviving the camp, joined the army and went back to continue the liberation before ultimately settling in America. I think about the years he spent writing and speaking at synagogues and Jewish centers, trying to preserve his memories so others could learn from them. I think about the removal of his tattoo, and of his refusal to tell me stories when I was deemed too young; it would take me years to piece together the fragments I now have. I think about how, when the weather was nice, he used to take the train to the botanical gardens to photograph the flowers, or how he’d walk to the cinema every Friday night to watch whichever picture caught his eye on the marquee. He hasn’t seen this film yet. I doubt he ever will.
The final shots of the film bring us back to Rudolf Höss, who turns and walks down another stairwell into the endless darkness. A black screen is held for more than a few beats as the uneasy score rises, and then finally the credits begin. We sat in the dark of the theater, all of us together as the memories of that film we had just seen crystallized, and then almost immediately began to decay. This essay itself is just another form of preservation, an attempt to capture what I witnessed clearly the way that film sometimes can, but already my memory of it is flickering and fading, eventually to bleed into the dusk of days, same as even the brightest of sunbeams.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
