Film 'The Commandant’s Shadow’ brings new perspective to Holocaust - review

The new film, The Commandant’s Shadow, directed by Daniela Volker, which just ended its theatrical run in the US and which will open throughout Israel on June 13, tells the true story that was fictionalized in The Zone of Interest, about the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Höss, who brought his family to live in a compound on the camp grounds, and as is so often the case, the truth is far more interesting, and more layered, than its fictional depiction.

The Commandant’s Shadow, which won the Yad Vashem Award for Outstanding Holocaust Documentary at Docaviv this year, is told through the perspectives of five people, two of whom were portrayed in Zone: Rudolph Höss, whose thoughts are taken from an autobiography he wrote in prison after the war and which are read aloud by an actor, as well as from his testimony at the Nuremberg trials; his son, Hans Jurgen Höss, now an elderly man; Hans’s son, Kai Höss, a Christian preacher; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, an Auschwitz survivor now living in the UK; and Anita’s daughter, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, who moves to Germany. 

Different perspectives bring depth to Holocaust

All of them bring something different to the story, and their viewpoints each add a little bit to our understanding of how the massive slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust took place and how it has affected the world up to the present. 

These five people run the gamut from the man who oversaw the day-to-day details of the killing machine; his son, who must have witnessed some hints about what was happening but remained willfully blind until now; the grandson who chose to confront the reality of what his grandfather did; one of the millions of death-camp inhabitants who survived and made a new life; and her daughter, whose life has been colored by her mother’s trauma. 

The movie, which features striking cinematography and high production values not usually seen in documentaries, opens with a stunning image of two men walking through the Judean desert. They turn out to be Hans and Kai, who says, “It feels strange being here with my father, in the Judean desert, which his own father crossed in 1917, during World War I, when he was the youngest non-commissioned officer in the German army. 

Thirty years later, when he was nearing his death, he wrote, ‘The life and death of the Jews is truly a riddle I have not been able to solve.’ By then, he had killed more people than any other man in all of history.”

In just these few sentences, Kai sets up the theme of the movie, which is how to absorb the fact that such a slaughter occurred, and how incomprehensible it is to understand that people in your life were involved in it, as either victim or perpetrator. Not to detract from the story of the Lasker-Wallfisch family, but while we have heard from the victims before, there have been fewer attempts to portray the point of view of the perpetrators, which is probably one of the reasons for the success of Zone. 

As the film points out, while the vast majority of Nazis put on trial after the war in one way or another either denied their involvement in the killing or claimed ignorance of the details of the slaughter, Höss owned up to what he did, in both his testimony and his autobiography. In a certain way, he could be said to use the “just-following-orders” defense, and he said, “I did not give any thought to the killing itself. It had been ordered and I had to execute it.” 

However, and not surprisingly, he goes on to contradict this statement many times, showing that he thought a great deal about the killing. 

To set a personal example for the men he commanded, he took care to observe every aspect of what they did in detail, even entering the gas chambers with a group slated to be killed and observing their deaths while wearing a gas mask, a bizarre detail I have not heard quoted anywhere else. He also sometimes personally oversaw such tasks as the Sonderkommandos removing victims’ teeth and other aspects of the disposal of the bodies. 

Rudolph remembers the “heartbreaking screams” of mothers whose children were absorbed in a game and fought the Sonderkommandos who forced them into the gas chamber and adds, “Seeing women walk into the gas chambers with children, I often thought of my own family.”

But as ghastly as his work was, according to his son, he didn’t bring it home. Hans, who has memories of the idyllic home life portrayed in Zone, says in a sentence that only he and his siblings could utter, “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz.” 

He claims that he and his siblings, who are shown playing with such toys as a wooden bomber plane made by Auschwitz inmates, thought that his father ran a prison camp and was aware of only one death, an inmate shot during an escape attempt. 

He insists that he does not remember the acrid smoke from the crematoria which were burning as many as 10,000 humans per day, an odor that those living miles away from the camp have said they could smell throughout the war. His son suggests that his father may have blocked out this memory. 

But while it has taken Hans his entire life to deal with his father’s legacy, he does confront it here. “It’s hard to believe for me and it’s a big shock because we knew [my father] as a different person,” he says. 

Hans travels to the US to speak to his sister, who cannot see his father’s crimes as clearly as he, although she does admit that at times the pain she experiences from cancer seems like a punishment for his sins. Eventually, Hans joins Kai and Maya on a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, walking the grounds of the camp that was outside his bedroom wall for years but which he had never visited before – and later goes to Israel with Kai. 

Anita, who is interviewed throughout the film and is also heard speaking in a 1945 radio interview, managed to survive the death camp as a cellist performing in the camp orchestra. 

She kept herself together after the war by not speaking about her experiences and had a successful career as a classical musician in England, where she became a citizen. 

While her daughter speaks of feeling traumatized by knowing something horrible had happened to her mother but not understanding exactly what, Anita explains that she dealt with her experiences as best she could. “I’m the wrong mother for my daughter. Traumatized? Forget it. Get on with it,” Anita says. 

The climax of the film is a meeting between Kai, Hans, Anita, and Maya in Anita’s home. Anita, who refused to travel to Auschwitz, offers a touching absolution to Hans, who is tormented by his discovery of the details of his father’s horrendous deeds, telling him, “It was brave of you to do this.”

Speaking of the antisemitism that continues into the present, Anita says, “You can’t forgive what happened. But the important thing is that we talk to each other and understand each other. The important thing... is not what we’ve done, but what we’re doing now.”