the prayer and get rid of it. Do you know the kaddish? I’ll say it. What’s his name? There’s nothing more to do.”
In the camp’s hellish world of forced work, Saul views this response as an abdication of professional responsibility and storms off, intent on finding a new rabbi. He hears there may be one “outside”—that is, among the men who work burning bodies in the field. So, he joins a work group there, where he meets a man who is covertly taking photographs of the mass cremation—a nod to real-life photos we saw on our FASPE trip18.
Saul eventually finds the rabbi shoveling ashes into the Soła, and when this man won’t help either, they scuffle. SS officers intervene, mocking Saul and killing the rabbi. Stuck once again without a rabbi to conduct a Jewish burial, Saul is pulled into a rebellion plot by fellow Sonderkommandos, for which he must go to the women’s camp in Kanada and get a package of explosives. Under the cover of night, he uses the opportunity to search for a new rabbi amongst a new group of Jewish arrivals who are being led into the woods and indiscriminately executed. Believing he’s found one, Saul smuggles the man into their bunks and explains that the dead boy is actually his son. Although we don’t know if this is true—a fellow Sonderkommando believes it is not—Saul goes to bed looking forward to the burial. But the next day, the rebellion begins, and Saul must escape.
Throughout its runtime, Son of Saul handles the Sonderkommando’s role through one man’s eyes alone. This creates a level of ambiguity that is critical to the film’s perspective, namely how the horrors of the Holocaust blurred lines among perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and bystanders, often making people play more than one role at once. Historically, fellow inmates disliked the Sonderkommando; in fact, at a screening of Son of Saul in Berlin, an Auschwitz survivor recounted: “We hated them more than we hated the Germans, because they were from my people […] and they lent a hand in the killing process.”
Seen one way, there’s no doubt they are complicit. The men clock in and do their job every day. Throughout the film, for instance, a Jewish Oberkapo named Biederman is especially brutal to other Jews, even though he’s one of the leaders of the planned uprising. In one particularly telling spat between the German Biederman and a Jewish “equal,” Biederman sucker-punches the man and spits, “Jewish rat,” underscoring the complex hierarchy among prison functionary roles, religion, race, and the constantly shifting power dynamics between the men vis-à-vis their jobs.
On the other hand, Sonderkommandos are obviously also victims. The same survivor from the Berlin premiere went on to explain that it wasn’t until many years after the Holocaust that he realized that the Sonderkommandos’ “suffering was much greater, much deeper, much more profound than my suffering”19. Indeed, Saul actor Géza Röhrig vehemently disputed a journalist’s claim that the men were “half-victim, half hangman,” saying rather, “they are 100% victims”20. Either way, Son of Saul presents a protagonist who, due to the demands of his (forced) job, operates in a moral gray zone. Saul is so robotically efficient in his role, shifting automatically from sponging up blood to clearing the shoes of the newly murdered, that it’s especially heartbreaking when we learn that he was just a watchmaker in the unimaginably distant past before Auschwitz. The profession seems cruelly poetic, though, as we observe his tightly wound motions, like those of an automaton.
Son of Saul leaves the reality of simultaneous victimhood and perpetration unresolved. Can one man be both? Even as Saul is subjected to horrific treatment— and we are told that he’s likely next in line to be gassed—he singularly focuses on burying a young boy’s lifeless body. He is caught between worlds just by doing his job.
The Professional as Professional:
The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a cinematic departure in more ways than one. Its plot is intentionally barebones compared to the 126 speaking parts and 30,000 extras in Schindler’s List;21 it doesn’t show us the horrors inside a concentration camp like Son of Saul. Instead, it presents the day-to-day domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family. In doing so, The Zone of Interest minces no words. Professionals, at the end of the day, are just that: professionals. Their complicity in the Holocaust (as in every other modern atrocity) is almost a given. This bleakly matter-of-fact interpretation, unfortunately, best reflects the field learnings from our FASPE trip: that vast and almost total complicity of businesspeople, lawyers, and technologists was at the center of the Nazis’ genocidal project.
Commandant Höss lives in the eponymous 40-square-kilometer “zone of interest,” the patrolled administrative area around the Auschwitz complex. His family’s stucco, white home is picturesque, manicured, and simple, and a high wall separates it from the horrors of the camp on the other side. To fully immerse the viewer in his family’s psychological state— including that of his wife, Hedwig, and their five young children—we never see past that wall.
Unlike how he’s presented as a character in Schindler’s List thirty years prior (shadowy, bribe-taking, stern, powerful), here Höss is just a professional going about his business. Hedwig keeps a closely tended garden, the children play in a backyard waterslide, and various family members and friends cycle through for social engagements. The film is a slice of life, with static cameras observing the relaxed and domestic bustle of the household, such as when Hedwig’s mom visits, when Rudolf learns of a big promotion, or when an extramarital affair is briefly glimpsed. Rudolf is unflappable in his dutiful professionalism, fatherly concern, and careerist ambition. When the movie ends, we can’t be sure if anything has changed at all in the mindsets or worldviews of any of the characters.
Rather than plot, it’s the subtext-rich script and deft filmmaking toolkit that Glazer and his crew employ that fill in the 95-minute runtime with direct and indirect information about the extent of the evil just offscreen. Chief among these tools is the audio. Sound designers Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers did their research, collecting more than six hundred pages of Auschwitz witness and survivor testimonies about sound at the camp22. They then applied that research by building a sound library that took over a year to complete. It includes distant barking dogs and gunshots, muted yells and unintelligible screams, churning and chugging machinery, and the screeching metal of trains and crematoria. The auditory horror implies the incomprehensible violence that is never shown but which is the backdrop for the quotidian goings-on.
The power of sound in conveying the all-encompassing landscape of death and despair evolved organically from the film’s message. The same is true for the cinematography, led by Lukasz Zal, which frames the bleached walls and simple wooden furniture of the house with enough negative space to feel safely confined, even as we understand the vastness of the pain and death just out of sight.
The accomplishments of the crew contribute a sense of dread to the script’s euphemisms, with its considerable use of faux racial “science,” hyper-sterilized language, and shared businesslike implications—all part and parcel of the Nazi genocide. The professional activities of The Zone of Interest are particularly harrowing due to their seeming mundanity. From the perspective of the potentially unethical activity of businesspeople, the film’s first example of this dual reality is also its most memorable. Rudolf, a fellow SS officer, and two civilians carry briefcases and rolled-up blueprints through the villa garden, making small talk about their train journey. The exchange indicates familiarity: the fellow SS officer nods, “welcome back!” and one civilian responds, “we’re glad to be here.” They make their way into the house and take their seats around a table, unfurling the blueprints. What commences is grotesque in its instant recognizability: a sales pitch. We learn from a blueprint logo that the civilians are men
18. Inspired by the real Sonderkommando photographs taken by a Greek Jew named Alex, as learned during FASPE.
19. Jacqueline Shields, “Concentration Camps: The Sonderkommando”, Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2024.
20. Toby Axelrod, “Is Germany ready for ‘Son of Saul’s up-close Holocaust experience?”, The Times of Israel, February 29, 2016.
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