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.
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.