A little 'paradise' beside Hell

The Zone of Interest

I visited Auschwitz about 20 years ago, while with a group of friends having a city break in Krakow. We had a spare day after exploring most of the old town and the choice was between that and the famous salt mines. When we got to Krakow station, there were no more trains going to either that day and so an old guy in a taxi stopped us outside and asked if we wanted to be taken to the camp; he drove us, waited and took us back, for what seemed like a reasonable price. He spoke almost no English, and all he said after we came back, ashen-faced, was ‘the Germans, crazy huh?’

As anyone who has visited the Nazi death camp will know, it is hard to think of anything else for weeks afterwards. Like contemplating the size of the universe, the sheer scale of evil is difficult to comprehend, and as the crime has become more distant in history the collective trauma in some ways has grown.

As I get older, I read less and less about the Second World War, finding it too upsetting, and the Holocaust is by some distance the most distressing episode. But nonetheless a friend talked me into watching The Zone of Interest.

Jonathan Glazer’s latest, based on the Martin Amis novel, is not really a Holocaust film. It’s more of a domestic drama, about a very dull middle-class couple who find themselves in an attractive house with servants thanks to the husband’s job. It’s just that the job happens to involve killing people on an industrial scale.

I remember at school being shown extracts from the journal of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz and protagonist of this movie. The blandness was the whole point; he wrote about his family problems – daughter feeling sick, wife complaining, job worries – like just another middle-ranking, middle-aged salaryman moaning about all the burdens placed on him.