Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest—a fictionalized study of the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp commandant whose family lived right beside his workplace—is a film about monstrous detachment, willful blindness, and moral rot. It’s apt, then, that The Commandant’s Shadow, a documentary about this true story, tackles similar themes, albeit from the unique perspective of the descendants of both Höss and one of the camp’s survivors. A powerful portrait of the need to face and investigate the past, and also the terrible difficulty of doing so, Daniela Völker’s non-fiction feature (May 29, in theaters) is an overpowering work of excavation and confrontation—as well as a timely and urgent warning about the continuing threat of antisemitism.
Hans Jürgen Höss had a happy upbringing alongside his siblings and his parents Rudolf and Hedwig, and at age 87, he claims that he knew little about what was going on outside the family’s Auschwitz villa, which sat less than 200 yards away from one of the concentration camp’s gas chambers. “As children we thought this was a prison and he was the boss,” he confides in The Commandant’s Shadow, further stating, “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz.” Though he seems sincere, his son Kai, a Christian preacher, cannot fathom his father’s supposed ignorance of the horrific events that took place next door to his home (the crematorium stacks were visible from Hans’ bedroom window) and the backyard garden and pool where the family played and entertained. “That is just mind-blowing when you think about it,” Kai says. To him, it’s clear that his dad is in severe denial. “I don’t think he dealt with anything personally. I can’t imagine it.”
As Kai persuasively surmises, Hans appears to have buried the truth so deep within his subconscious that it barely exists, and he’s perpetuated his obliviousness by avoiding all contact with tales about his father, including Rudolf’s autobiography Commandant of Auschwitz. Rudolf wrote that confession while awaiting execution, and passages from it are read in voiceover in The Commandant’s Shadow by Klemens Koehring. Those passages detail his pride at being selected by Heinrich Himmler to construct the camp, and his dedication to overseeing every aspect of its operation first-hand (including being in the gas chambers themselves, with a mask on, during exterminations) because he believed that his work (i.e. saving Germans from their Jewish adversaries) was justified. In both traditional interviews shot against black backdrops (the better to cast him as adrift in darkness), and in conversations with his son Kai, Hans comes across as a man unwilling to grapple with the legacy of his beloved father as, per Kai, “the greatest mass murderer in human history.”
ADVERTISEMENT
One of the people who escaped Rudolf’s clutches was Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was spared the fate that so many of her Jewish brethren suffered at Auschwitz because she was a trained cellist and, therefore, assigned to join the camp orchestra that played tunes each day for both the guards and the inmates marching to and from their toil. Now an impressively spry 98 years old, Anita speaks about her ordeal and its aftermath in somber matter-of-fact fashion. Her daughter Maya, on the other hand, is still gravely wounded by the Holocaust, since—because her mother never spoke about her WWII nightmare—it left her with a formless, shapeless trauma that hovered over her life. Maya is the embodiment of second-generation suffering, and her tears upon looking at childhood photos of herself (overweight, and to her mind “misshapen” by her mom’s figurative absence) speak to the depth and rawness of her scars.
The Commandant’s Shadow is an intimate snapshot of these four individuals, all of them connected through awful Holocaust experience. Director Völker parallels them as a means of exploring the various ways in which the past is encountered, processed, and surmounted—although it’s clear that the last of those endeavors isn’t really possible, considering the sheer enormity of the tragedy at hand and the irreconcilable feelings it breeds. For Hans as well as for his sister Puppi, whom he reunites with in the U.S. after 50 years, and who continues to downplay her father and mother’s culpability, there’s no way to resolve fond memories with unspeakable facts. That schism is at the heart of the documentary, and most forcefully addressed by Kai, whose response to learning about the “coldness of [Rudolf’s] soul” has been to turn to Jesus Christ in order to find salvation from the sins of his fathers.
In the film’s amazing finale, Maya accompanies Hans and Kai to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where Hans is forced to cope with the unthinkable atrocities perpetrated by his dad. “It’s horrendous to see what he did here. It’s hard to believe and for me it’s a big shock. Because we knew him as a different person.” Less unpleasant, however, is the foursome’s subsequent meeting at Anita’s home, where they have tea and pie and try to comprehend the sheer strangeness of this get-together. That, of course, is as futile as Hans’ attempts to find peace with his heritage, as well as Anita’s efforts to understand how her clan (“We were Germans”) and so many like them were preyed upon by their neighbors. In the end, they’re simply a collection of irreparably broken individuals, tasked with dealing with a truly impossible situation.
The one thing everyone can agree on in The Commandant’s Shadow is that the Holocaust was merely the most terrible expression of a hatred that never dies. While they pray during their concentration camp visit that humanity has learned from this genocide, Hans remarks, “I don’t think we have. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be antisemitism again like there is now.” Speaking about global Jews, Anita opines, “You don’t belong anywhere. And where you should belong, you got the biggest problem.” Given their first-hand relationships to such intolerance, their words carry immense weight, and they resound with even greater timeliness at film’s end, when Kai speaks about the creation of Israel as a Jewish haven from future persecution and slaughter—a notion that, as last Oct. 7 proved, has yet to fully come to pass.
