A few years ago I spent much of a day on a tour of the Auschwitz and
Birkenau death camps. Needless to say it was a sobering, soul–wrenching experience I will never forget. As part of the tour, our guide pointed out
a large house mostly hidden behind a wall and we learned that this was
where the Auschwitz camp commandant, Rudolph Hoess, lived with his wife and children while mass murder on an unimaginable scale was being conducted
only barely hidden from easy view but certainly within earshot just yards
away. We learned that Herr Hoess’s wife Hedwig was delighted that her
husband had been posted to this wonderful location where she could raise
her children in a lovely home with a beautiful garden. Paradise on the
doorstep of hell.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST limits itself to telling little more than the story of this family while they lived there. Theirs is a charmed existence filled
with happy days enjoying hikes in the countryside picnics and swimming by
the river, picking berries, splashing in the backyard pool, and only occasionally being perturbed by something as off-putting as the discovery
of a stray body part in a riverbed or having to threaten a clumsy Jewish
house servant with having her ashes scattered across the fields of Poland.
The movie deals with the horror of Auschwitz not by showing it directly but
by contrasting the beauty of what the viewer sees with the monstrous crime
the viewer knows is being committed just out of sight; by contrasting the loving nature of the parents with the evil that lurks beneath and
occasionally peeks through their smiling faces; by dramatizing the
nonchalance with which the Nazis devised the most efficient ways to carry
out mass murder.

I sincerely wondered how the family that was described to me on my tour
could possibly have lived the way they did. Now I have seen what likely
went on behind that wall. It’s a good movie, quite interesting and well
worth a watch.

--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog

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