February 29, 2024
Everyman, Blossom Street, York
An everyday story of Nazi folk…
This film is not about Auschwitz. It’s about a woman trying to make a nice home for her family, and a man trying to provide for them. It just happens that they live next door to a concentration camp and he’s the boss. This is about their own zone.
They live in a lovely environment, where they can picnic on the river banks, go swimming, then go back to their lovely house only marred by the noise. It’s subtle. But it’s very, very important.
The roar.
The dull background roar.
The almost continuous dull background roar.
The father want to expand his business “load.” His business is killing. His load are the dead. But like any business man, he sits in a business meeting, calmly discussing the new furnaces, that will provide a 24 hour background roar. To them, it’s just business.
Occasionally there’s the boom of a bittern, biblical omen of desolation. This film uses sound beautifully; mostly that roar, or the sudden lack of it when not at the house, slowly creeps along your spine, making you feel uncomfortable, especially at the beginning when it dawns on you exactly what the noise is and what it represents.
There’s no shots of these in use, no emaciated victims, no blood, no gore, because they have conveyed the horror without any need for this.
Curtains and doorways reveal new scenes, not just to us but ‘outsiders’ in the film. The grandmother comes to stay in this alien world, and is the first character to see through our eyes and it is too much for her. At first she is no better than the rest, discussing dividing up the property of Jewish neighbour, but you can see the start of her awakening to what is actually going on as she pulls back a curtain and the dull road is seen as the fiery furnaces burning through the night.
And there is another motif: the pleasant family life set inside high walls, but no so high to completely block out Auschwitz, which insinuates itself into family life into the servants who are mostly part of the furniture. It’s not the centre of the screen that draws your focus at times, but what is all around the edges, coming through your ears, and behind the windows and through the doors.
One of the most chilling moments is when the mother, annoyed with a servant, threatens death in such a casual, off-hand manner that you almost do a double take. Annoyed. Not angry, not in the heat of the moment, just a thing to say when already unhappy, and need to take it out on somebody but without any fire to it.
A more sympathetic character is the girl with the apples, trying to help, causing death instead, completely unintentionally. Did this happen in real life? Did she ever realise what her well intentioned gifts brought with them?
Don’t expect a big ending where everybody gets what they deserve. If you want to find out what happened to the father, Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, look him up (spoiler alert: he does not get a happy ending).
What we do get, just as we’re wondering where we are heading, is a subtle, impactful reminders of the extent of the killings, in a modern setting, interspersed with Höss’s vomiting foreshadowing later revulsion at the crimes he had once committed with complete indifference.
This is not a comfortable film to watch, but I would not be surprised if it makes it onto the National Curriculum as what it portrays is so important, and so well crafted.
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