Twisted

I thought Zone of Interest was the best movie of the year. And maybe of many years. While I enjoyed many of the other movies that were nominated, I thought Zone of Interest was close to perfect. A movie about Auschwitz without any scenes of Auschwitz and the more powerful because of that. We simply watch the domestic life of Rudolf Hoss and his family in a pleasant home with a nice garden that abuts the outside wall of the death camp.

I understand that some people have complained that the film is boring—nothing happens. Actually a few things do happen, but most of the power of the film comes from subtle asides and remarks and things we see on screen that are treated as mundane but have greater significance. To give one example, early in the film, the wife of the commandant admires herself in a fur coat she’s acquired, presumably confiscated from an inmate of the camp after arriving. The wife mentions offhandedly to someone that the lining of the coat needs re-sewing. Jews often sewed jewels in the linings of their coat hoping to use them for bribes or living expenses after leaving everything else behind. The Nazis discovered that strategy and presumably tore every lining to make sure that they seized everything. I caught the meaning of that small detail but missed a number of others. What a punch that detail carries—the contrast between the desperation of someone journeying into the unknown hoping against hope to retain some measure of autonomy and the annoyance of having to take care of mending a coat.

And of course that nothing happens is the main point of the movie. We watch a family pursue ordinary pursuits, squabble over petty domestic issues, and deal with domestic servants—humdrum stuff. All while over a million people are gassed and burned within earshot. (That last line is my attempt at understatement. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll understand.)

The dialogue is sparse but near-perfect. The acting is superb. The filming was done with set cameras running without people behind them as the actors moved around the house and garden. This gives the film a reality-tv look or documentary look. It’s almost as if we’re watching the Hoss family’s home movies.

Zone of Interest is a masterpiece.

I was thrilled when it was nominated not just for Best International Feature Film but also for Best Picture. In the run-up to the Academy Awards I imagined that director and screenwriter Jonathan Glazer would have a chance to address the world, not just about the Holocaust—which he had done so superbly in his movie—but about the fearsome rise in Jew-hatred around the world and that the lessons of the Holocaust are sadly relevant today.

It didn’t turn out that way.

Zone of Interest did not win Best Picture but it did win Best International Feature Film and Jonathan Glazer did have a chance to speak. But he said nothing explicit about Jew-hatred. As it turned out, most of his message was obscured by a bizarre word choice and an amoral both-sides rhetoric. Sadly, the world twisted his words. And maybe more sadly, Glazer—a professional scriptwriter—made it easy for the scripted words of his acceptance speech to get twisted. Let’s see what he said (taken from the Vulture website).

Thank you so much. I’m gonna read. Thank you to the Academy for this honor and to our partners A24, Film4, Access, and Polish Film Institute; to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for their trust and guidance; to my producers, actors, collaborators. All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the — [Applause.] Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? [Applause.] Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.

Let’s start with the blunder. “Refute” is not the right word. I think he meant “repudiate.” Refute means to disprove. Repudiate means to reject. Just as bad, Glazer paused as he delivered the line with “refute” in it, so the world heard:

Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust…

and then he paused. It sounded like he was disavowing his Judaism or maybe denying the Holocaust. But that is not what he meant or said. When you include the rest of the sentence you get:

Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.

It’s a very convoluted sentence. I take it that he was saying that the suffering of October 7 and of the war in Gaza is the result of the occupation and that the Holocaust and being Jewish have been used, wrongly, to justify that occupation. And based on what he said in the first part of his remarks, underlying the general problem in the Middle East is dehumanization, presumably by both sides of the conflict.

So what to make of this? Yes, dehumanization is a terrible thing. But is that the cause of our problems here in the Middle East? And is the suffering of this moment really the result of Jews using the Holocaust or their Jewishness to justify the Occupation? It’s such a repugnant thought. Let me try to untangle it. I take Glazer to be saying that because Jews have suffered through the ages—suffering that reached a tragic zenith in the Holocaust—they use this suffering to justify causing others to suffer—the so-called Occupation.

(I modify '“occupation” with “so-called” because the attack on October 7th came not from the West Bank, but from Gaza, which Israel de-occupied in 2005. That exit did not help. It emboldened Hamas.)

I don’t like the Occupation. I wish Israel had better choices for how to deal with the fact that the children and grandchildren of the people who lived here in 1948 and who were either pushed out or who ran away when war broke out then, do not seem willing to recognize the Jewish state that has flourished where they once lived. And a bunch of them—we don’t know how many—seem eager to kill Jews who live in the land called Israel. And want to do it again and again.

I try not to dehumanize Gazans. I have said over and over again that there is no collective responsibility of Gazans for the evil acts of October 7. That many people voted for Hamas in 2006 does not mean they deserve punishment for October 7. That some people cheered and celebrated on October 7 does not justify deaths from the air for Gazans. I desperately want to believe that there are thousand if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who want a better life for their children as I do.

I am also open to the possibility that Israeli policies have hardened the hearts of our neighbors in Gaza and the West Bank. But will no one hold those neighbors accountable for their share of the blame? Is it really just two sides dehumanizing each other? I don’t think so. That is my prejudice and the prejudice of millions of my brothers and sisters here in Israel. We Israelis don’t want to kill Gazan civilians. But when you rape our women, and steal our children, we won’t take it quietly. Our resolve to prevent another October 7 has nothing to do with our Jewishness or the Holocaust. It has to do with our love for each other. In his eagerness to strike a blow for justice, Jonathan Glazer has with tragic irony, dehumanized me and my fellow Israelis.

There was a bright spot in Glazer’s speech. In Zone of Interest, there’s a Polish teenager who at night leaves apples in the mud and dirt near entrances to the camp for the inmates of Auschwitz to find when they pass by. In the film she is anonymous, a phantom of kindness who flits in the darkness and dispenses a little bit of light. Her character is based on a real life hero. Thanks to Jonathan Glazer’s speech, we know her name: Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk. She died before the film was finished. She never saw the film. She did not hear Glazer’s dedicating his Oscar to her. Now the world at least, can honor her memory, rightfully so.