Hedwig Hoss is giving her mother a tour of her garden, pointing out the roses and dahlias. There’s the greenhouse, and here’s a little wading pool for the children, she says. This is where we will set up our picnic, and in a few months, flowering creepers will cover the roof of this pavilion. “You’ve done well for yourself,” Hedwig’s mother marvels. The neatly-dressed blonde housewife and mother of five, a proud Nazi Hausfrau, beams with joy and pride: She has built a slice of paradise for her family — just across the wall from the hell on earth that is the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Many viewers may have flashed to this scene, as they heard Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the 76th Academy Awards, where his film The Zone of Interest won the Best International Feature Film trophy. Reading out from a prepared speech, he said, “All our choices [in the film] were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now’…Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether [it is]the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanisation, how do we resist?”
It’s not surprising that Glazer’s was one of only two political speeches of the night, the other one being the plea for peace by Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, whose 20 Days in Mariupol won the Best Documentary Feature Film award. The Zone of Interest, after all, was one of the most overtly, urgently political of all the nominated films. Based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, The Zone of Interest is set in World War II and tells the fictionalised story of Rudolf Hoss, the real-life commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Glazer’s wide shots cast a seemingly dispassionate eye on Hoss and his family as they go about their lives and work — cooking, reading, gossiping with friends, luxuriating in their lovely garden and frolicking in a nearby river. It’s a charmed life, one that Hedwig and Rudolph have worked hard to build and which they won’t give up without a struggle. When Rudolph is promoted and transferred to Oranienburg, near Berlin, Hedwig refuses to leave their “home”. They eventually settle on her staying back with the children, while he visits them on the weekends. Housekeeping, child-rearing, career manoeuvrings — these are preoccupations that anyone, anywhere will find relatable.
And that is precisely the point. The Hosses — they are just like us. Of course, just over the wall bordering Hedwig’s delightful garden, thousands of Jewish people are incarcerated, forced into labour, gassed and gunned down, their bodies incinerated and the ashes dumped into the river in which the Hoss children learn to swim and where Rudolph enjoys a bit of weekend fishing. The viewer doesn’t need to watch these scenes of violence to know that mass murder is well underway even as the Hosses celebrate birthdays or when Rudolph reads to the girls at bedtime or when one of the boys is playing with a railway set in his room. You can hear it in the ratatat of gunfire, the barking of dogs, the screams of the helpless and the whistles and shouts of the guards and you can see it in the industrial structures, looming in the background of so many frames, built on slave labour and belching smoke into the air. At night, when the incinerators are turned on, the sky glows orange.
The Zone of Interest is an indictment of all those who look away or profit from such horror and carry on with their lives even as so many others come to a brutal end. It holds culpable people like the Hosses, of course, but also us, here, today — “not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now’, as Glazer said. Don’t get too comfortable, the film warns us, because this isn’t about what could happen or shouldn’t happen, but about what is, in fact, happening right now, from the violence of Gaza and Ukraine to the acts, big and small, that whittle away at freedom and equality everywhere.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
