The Zone of Interest in forgiveness
By Michael Cook, Mercator.
The Zone of Interest won two Oscars this year. It is a highly stylized dissection of the character of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz.
In his cozy home, with a wall separating his family from the horrors of the extermination camp, Höss was the kindly father of five children. On the other side, he was responsible for the deaths of three million people, mostly Jews and Poles.
The film ends after he discovers that he is going to be responsible for exterminating 430,000 Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz. Himmler has even named this logistical challenge after him –“Operation Höss”. Höss is honoured. The news puts a spring in his step – although something deep within him is revolted and he vomits as he fades out of the film.
If anyone was evil, it was Rudolph Höss. He was a monster. What he did was unspeakable and unforgivable. But we can learn more from Höss’s life than man’s capacity for surrendering to the darkest forms of evil. That’s a lesson that we all need to learn by heart. But the real-life story is also, amazingly, a lesson in mercy.
Höss was raised in a stern Catholic family, but he drifted away from religion in his teens. In 1922 he formally abjured his Catholic faith and ended up as a Nazi fanatic. He became an expert at running concentration camps, not only Auschwitz, but also the hellish prisons of Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück. At the end of the war, he disappeared into the chaos and found work as a gardener. He was eventually tracked down by the British. They handed him over to the Poles, because the worst of his crimes had been committed on Polish territory. He was tried in a Polish court and sentenced to death.
Movie trailer here.
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