Ignoring Genocide All Around Us

The Zone of Interest [film] gives an insightful and unsettling look at the normalisation of horrors.

I first read about the film The Zone of Interest in a review piece written by Toby Rogers, which made this film compulsive viewing. Rogers wrote:

Last Thursday the NY Times published a very strange review of the new Holocaust movie, The Zone of Interest. The review was written by Manohla Dargis who is one of the finest film critics in the country. But something was off about this piece.

Ms. Dargis is withering right out of the gate calling the movie hollow, a self-aggrandizing art-film, and pointless. I thought to myself, ‘What’s going on here!? NY Times movie reviewers generally have high praise for Holocaust films!’ And the words “hollow” and “pointless” are very different from calling something a “self-aggrandizing art film” (the first two terms are about emptiness, the last is about being overwrought). My Spidey-sense started tingling — Ms. Dargis is triggered! But why?

The more I read the more curious I got. The film is set in the residential neighborhood on the other side of the wall from the Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp during the years 1942 and 1943 — at the height of the industrialized mass murder carried out by the Nazis. But the film never directly shows what is happening inside the death camp. Instead, the film is about how the family of the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, ignores the genocide that is happening all around them. It sounded like a fascinating premise, yet the review is just a long string of insults that ends with her calling the movie “vacuous”.

The Zone of Interest is best understood as a horror film, however it never shows the violence directly. As the director explains in an interview it’s really two films — the visuals of the family going about their daily activities and the background audio that was created after the filming was completed.

The sound designer went to Auschwitz to record the natural sounds of the region and then interviewed survivors to identify all of the sounds that would have come from the machinery of death at the camp. So while you are watching the family on screen you are hearing the sounds of the death camp all around you. The sounds become omnipresent, oppressive, and terrifying but the family does everything they can to deny, normalize, and accept the genocide happening on the other side of the wall.

Many Holocaust films turn the Nazis into monsters — a cartoonish “other”. While indeed there were some monsters, Hannah Arendt teaches us that the genocide was run by the bureaucrats. Seeing the banality of evil depicted in this film — the camp commandant making sure his kids are ready for school and kissing his wife before going off to work — is far more scary because it points to the darkness that resides in the hearts of all people (even though it is not always expressed).

I found the point of the “darkness that resides in the hearts of all people” the most disturbing constant throughout the film, as it also had me drawing parallels to the ongoing C19 injection democide, and the midazolam democide. This darkness still manifests itself in several ways in 2024:

• Those that do not wish to see, do not see - complete denial of reality.

• Those that relish in othering the designated group as being dirty / dangerous / diseased / extremists / persona-non-grata.

• Those that acknowledge democide without actually acknowledging that it is democide / genocide - by citing the greater good.

• Those that manage / facilitate / implement the anti-law, kill-box, hospital death protocols, with enough emotional detachment, to simply view it all as ‘work’ - owing to various levels of sociopathy and psychopathy.

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At one point in the film, the mother of Hedwig Höss - Rudolf Höss’s wife - comes to visit, and there is an uncomfortable scene, in which they walk through the garden and an exchange of pleasantries takes place amidst casual enquiries about the camp boundaries - with deflective conversational attempts made to change the subject to the garden’s flowers, bees, honey, growing vegetables, and how the family is doing:

There's a grape vine.

Obviously, it'll grow.

It's huge.

I'm speechless.

It's all my design.

All the planting and everything.

The greenhouse, the gazebo at the end.

Is that a pool?

Yes..

I have gardeners. I couldn't do it alone.

With a slide?

Oh Heddy.

Do you like it?

Of course I like it. How could I not?

This was a field three years ago.

No.

We just had the lower garden by the street. And the house had a flat roof.

It's hard to believe. And that's the camp wall?

Yes, that's the camp wall.

We planted more vines at the back to grow and cover it.

Maybe Esther Silberman is over there.

Which one was she?

The one I used to clean for. She was the one who had the book readings.

God knows what they were up to. Bolshevik stuff. Jewish stuff.

And I got outbid on her curtains the street auction.

Her opposite, she got them.

I loved those curtains.

These flowers are so beautiful.

The azaleas there.

There are also vegetables.

A few herbs. Rosemary. Beetroot. This is fennel.

Sunflowers.

And here is kohlrabi. The children love to eat it.

Cabbage. Kale. Runner beans.

Pumpkins.

Potatoes and more.

We have bees over here to provide our honey.

It's a paradise garden.

And Rudolf is okay?

Yes, he's fine.

Working non-stop, even when he's home.

Which he loves.

He's a busy bee.

He is. Non-stop.

And under pressure like you wouldn't believe.

And you're okay?

Do I look okay?

Rudi calls me the Queen of Auschwitz.

Honestly.

To have all this.

You really have landed on your feet, my child.

The linden trees are turning yellow.

It smelled so nice when they were flowering.

This will grow and cover everything.

You'll see next time you visit.

Shortly afterwards, in one of a few rare moments in the film - whereby the viewer is given a short glimpse into one of the characters seemingly wrestling with their conscience - Hedwig Höss’s mother looks shocked whilst alone in her room at night, gazing out through the window at the plumes of smoke and ash being expelled from the crematoriums over the wall.

The next day she has left the Höss household without a trace.

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For Thailand based readers, The Zone of Interest is still showing at several cinemas around Bangkok, with showtimes listed here.

It might be worth taking someone along with you who still cannot see what is happening in 2024 - as this powerful film forces the viewer to confront the banality of evil.

Here’s the trailer:

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Nicholas Creed is a Bangkok based writer. All content is free for all readers, with nothing locked in archive that requires a paid subscription. Any support is greatly appreciated.

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