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 * The Real-Life Inspiration Behind <i>The Zone of Interest</i>’s Chilling
   Holocaust Tale


THE REAL-LIFE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE ZONE OF INTEREST’S CHILLING HOLOCAUST TALE

8 minute read
The Zone Of Interest | Official Trailer | A24

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By Armani Syed
January 12, 2024 10:32 AM EST

The Höss villa in southern Poland is an idyllic two-story building with a garden
landscaped to perfection. It is also located in the shadows of Auschwitz, the
largest and deadliest concentration camp of the Third Reich. The former house of
Nazi Commandant Rudolf Höss, who served as Camp Commandant of Auschwitz from May
1940 to December 1943, shared the home with his wife Hedwig, and their two
children. And the building is the locus of the action in Jonathan Glazer’s
insidious Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, his first film in the decade
since Under the Skin (2013), and the winner of the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI prize
at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

The film, adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name and releasing
nationwide in the U.S. on Jan. 12, depicts the domestic bliss of the Höss
family, who have built their Eden on genocidal foundations. And it never
contrasts this utopia with the victims of the Holocaust on the other side of the
wall. Instead, we stay with its perpetrators. The film opens with a family
enjoying a lake-side picnic, the sunshine ripe. But in the home setting, we
learn that Rudolf (Christian Friedel) is at the forefront of exterminating
European Jews. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who chillingly dubs herself “Queen of
Auschwitz,” runs a strict household that she places above all else—even her
husband. The family tries its best to drown out the sounds of screams, cries,
and gunshots, but the atrocities taking place beyond the wall are undeniable,
and seep in through the cracks.


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Read more: The Zone of Interest Is a Breath-Stopping, Hauntingly Original
Holocaust Drama


RECREATING THE HÖSS HOME

Christian Friedel as Rudolf in Zone of InterestCourtesy of A24

Production designer Chris Oddy knew that nailing the design of the home was
central to the film’s effectiveness. “We started at the outset in the real
house, and I think we must have visited it maybe six, seven times in total,”
says Oddy. “I got very familiar with the house and looked at it long enough to
see what was original.”



Oddy’s research enabled him to recreate the entire home and its garden as it
stood after Rudolph’s renovations. It was constructed in the same neighborhood,
not far from the original site. The house had been taken from a Polish family,
Oddy says, and subjected to architectural changes in the Höss family’s image.
After years of preparation, and four “very efficient” months of practical
efforts, the production team was able to stand in an embodiment of Nazi utopia,
a home that becomes as important as any character on screen.

“What Chris built there is really a direct simulation of the house and garden
and its proximity to the camp was essential for us,” Glazer says. “There's no
fantasy staging going on. You're looking at how they lived.” The recreated space
was a vacant home so close to the original address that it had a view of the
concentration camp’s chimney. The team had to rework the space to ensure there
were dynamic spaces to accommodate actors moving around, correctly positioned
bedrooms and Rudolph’s office, as well as windows in the right places.




CAPTURING THE MUNDANE SIDE OF EVIL

The mundane daily activities taking place inside the Höss residenceCourtesy of
A24

But the home, however spacious and well furnished, stands clinical and
uninviting on screen. The film was shot with 10 cameras concealed in locations
across the house, and no crew on set, to create a sense of neutral objectivity
in its storytelling. Glazer likens it to a Big Brother approach. Actors would
enter the set and just exist, performing mundane household activities in the
home while the cameras rolled. The filming took place across around 50 days,
cinematopher Łukasz Żal told Deadline.   

“Even though we're sort of intimately in their house, we are not getting wrapped
up in their screen psychologies,” Glazer says. “We’re watching them more for
their behavior and their actions than their thought.” He cemented this critical
distance by avoiding cinematic conventions and tools such as close-up shots,
artificial lighting, and makeup. This way, the viewer is not manipulated by the
“glory and glamorization of characters,” he adds. 



Instead, we are offered a detailed and frankly mundane insight into their
domestic routine; the children play, the husband and wife reminisce about old
memories, and Hedwig dolls herself up with lipstick and clothing taken from
Jewish women. We come no closer to knowing these perpetrators, yet their lives
don’t appear dramatically different from our own.

“Typically we may think of Nazis and people who commit atrocities as monsters
and therefore not us, not humans[…] which actually teaches us nothing,” says
Glazer. “It leaves us feeling a very safe distance, imagining that none of us
are capable of that.” In inviting viewers to the perpetrator’s side of the wall,
he invites us to reflect on our similarities with these people, to see that we
are all capable of such evil.

By spending time on this side of the wall, we come to see how effortlessly the
Höss couple compartmentalize the material success they’ve built on suffering.
“They were ordinary people who managed to separate their brains in such a way
that that wasn't troubling them,” says Oddy. “They sort of reveled in the
nouveau riche lifestyle that they'd carved out for themselves on the back of
this and didn't bat an eyelid.”



This compartmentalization is structurally present too. Glazer says The Zone of
Interest is formed of two films layered over each other, an aural and a visual
one. The film we hear when our eyes are shut is informed by the sounds of
archival footage, documentaries, and history books, he says.


THE POWER OF WHAT IS LEFT UNSEEN

Children at play in Zone of InterestCourtesy of A24

What we are left with is a film whose impact derives both from what it shows and
what it omits. The Zone of Interest transitions into documentary for a brief
moment toward the end of the film. With rare permission from the site’s
trustees, viewers are taken inside Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial in the
present day, as cleaners tend to the space. 



“They were again just capturing what actually happens at the museum every
morning of every day,” says Oddy. The crew worked with the museum for many
months, using its archive library and extensive collection of images to inform
the film.

“I had to predict what it was I wanted to find to some extent because they have
so many pictures they couldn't possibly have you go in and look through them,”
Oddy recalls, “In all the meetings we had with them, we just got closer and
closer in our association with them.”

The scenes filmed in the museum are our only glimpses of the other side of the
wall, away from the Höss family. We are left with Auschwitz’s harrowing legacy
and reminded of the full extent of the crimes of Nazism. The museum’s archives
provided valuable insight into the lives of Rudolph and Hedwig, who began as a
working-class family aspiring to a bourgeois lifestyle. Only through Höss’
military promotions—and the couple’s willingness to compartmentalize the
suffering that their ideology is responsible for—were they able to achieve this
level of social mobility and bankroll their aspirations.

In his post as Commander of Auschwitz, Rudolph was ultimately responsible for
the killing of nearly one million Jews and others held in the camp. After the
war ended, he lived under a false identity before British intelligence tracked
him down and arrested him. Ruloph testified in the Nuremberg Trials—a joint
tribunal ordered by France, the Soviet Union, the U.K., and the U.S. between
1945 and 1946—before he was tried in Poland and hanged on April 16, 1947 at the
site of his crimes. 



Rudolph never admitted guilt for his actions, insisting until the end—in a
refrain that became hauntingly familiar as the justification of so many other
Nazis—that he was simply following orders. Hedwig established a new life in
Germany, eventually remarrying and moving to America, where she lived until she
died at 90. 

We do not see this aftermath depicted in the film. Instead, Glazer leaves the
audience in the haunting thick of what he calls “ambient genocide.” Many
effective films have been made about the Holocaust, many of them leaving viewers
with indelible images of suffering. What Glazer has added to that body of work
is a film in which the most horrifying atrocities are just outside the frame.
“The atrocities are perpetual,” he says, even if you can’t see them. “When I
view every frame in the film, it's always there.”


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Write to Armani Syed at armani.syed@time.com


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