If you saw <em>The Zone of Interest</em> last year – the extraordinary film based on a novel by Martin Amis – about the family life of Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, directed by Jonathan Glazer, you will not want to miss this companion piece documentary, <em>The Commandant’s Shadow</em>, featuring Hans-Jurgen Höss (Rudolf’s son, now 87) and his grandson Kai Höss, a pastor from south Germany.
As counterweight, the film also includes Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the distinguished cellist who played in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, thereby securing her exclusion from the gas chambers, while Hans-Jurgen was an innocent child playing in the garden next door. We then get to meet Anita’s daughter, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, an eminent psychoanalytic psychotherapist who talks movingly about transgenerational trauma and how being the child of an Auschwitz survivor has shaped the entire course of her life.
The victimhood sturdily denied by Anita who is very much in the “let’s just get on with life” party cannot be so easily avoided. What the film is at pains to make clear is that there is no escape from the consequences of what happened at Auschwitz, even if you were lucky enough to have survived, like Anita.
In the opening scenes we see Hans-Jurgen and Kai Höss walking in the rippling dunes of the Judean desert, where Rudolf himself had served during the First World War as the youngest NCO in the German army. The camerawork deliberately emphasises the long but unequal shadows cast by both men on the sand as a way of demonstrating the profoundly disturbing darkness of their inheritance from Rudolf. Kai, as a pastor, is particularly haunted by the verse from Exodus 34:7: God “will visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation”.
The documentary then accompanies Hans-Jurgen and Kai as they go round Hans-Jurgen’s childhood home at Auschwitz (now Oświęcim in southern Poland), a villa bang next to the camp which is uncannily like the one recreated in Glazer’s film. Hans-Jurgen is keen to emphasise the innocence of his childhood there, protesting that he never smelt the stench of burning bodies from the crematorium (although his father’s autobiography written in prison testifies to how the smell spread to the surrounding area and was commented on by many people).
He rather gives himself away when he looks out of an upper window and points to a stand of trees at the bottom of the garden, telling Kai the crematorium was there but is now invisible, exactly the kind of double-speak the documentary sets out to reveal. Kai Höss is noticeably tender with his father but states clearly that he thinks Hans-Jurgen is in deep, almost terminal, denial.
In north London, Anita and her daughter talk of memory and of how unlike they are as mother and daughter. What is so interesting about this documentary, however, is how denial is present on both sides, in both Anita and Hans-Jurgen – just of a different kind. She denies out of necessity, claiming it allowed her to survive, which it clearly did, but in the following scenes Maya talks over a montage of photographs of her as a solid, unsmiling child, tragically describing herself as being physically “misshapen” – the body keeps the score, just a generation down.
We follow Hans-Jurgen as he goes to visit his sister in America whom he has not seen, interestingly, for over half a century – one wonders why. Inge-Brigitt, known as Puppi, is in enraged denial about what Vati (as they called their father) was doing, desperate to hang on to the image of a loving father. Puppi is clearly so close to death herself (she has cancer) that these scenes verge on the grotesque as she tries to dodge the truth, even as it threatens to crush her.
Gradually the narrative circles its way towards its climax. Maya, now living in Germany as a German national, wants Anita to meet Hans-Jurgen and Kai at Auschwitz itself in order to achieve some kind of catharsis. Anita refuses to go, but says she will meet the Höss men for tea at her house in London. The meeting between the four is incredibly moving, but the culmination of the film lies in the previous scenes where Maya accompanies Hans-Jurgen and Kai as they process slowly round Auschwitz. She walks in tandem with the two men but slightly apart, wearing dark glasses, like some sort of Virgilian guide in the darkness of hell. Her dignity is extraordinary, something she has in common with her mother.
<em>The Commandant’s Shadow is streaming on Amazon Prime</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
