Last night, I watched the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, and I can still feel it in my gut. It taps into present concerns as I survey the political and social landscape of my country and the world at large. Theologically, the film reminds us of what many religions have long asserted—depravity lurks in the human heart. “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom 3:1-12; NIV; see also Isa 53). Human atrocity is not perpetrated by “monsters,” but by ordinary people.
A Holocaust movie unlike any other I’ve seen, The Zone of Interest, is a horror film without the typical gore. The terror is in watching ordinary people live next to and participate in great evil—literally right next door. The film portrays, with considerable accuracy, the life of the Höss family who lived at Auschwitz. The father, Rudolf, was a commandant at the concentration camp and the mastermind of mass murder. While he “goes to the office” every day, his wife Hedwig and their children enjoy a luxurious life with death trains, gunshots, and burning bodies just beyond their peaceful garden wall.
In the film, Holocaust victims are not visible. We don’t see starving bodies, the squalor of the camp, the piles of shoes whose owners have been brutally killed. But we hear terror. The film juxaposes the visual beauty of the landscape and the mundane serenity of the Höss home with the sounds of violence—the victims’ screams, the yelling of guards, the trains, and most disturbing of all the film’s overall soundtrack, created by sound designer Johnnie Burn, composer Mica Levi, and sound mixer Tarn Willers. We are accostumed to films using visual elements to shock our sensibilities, which can leave us desensitized to cinematically portrayed violence. Instead, The Zone of Interest uses sound to incredible effect. In this way, the victims’ reality remains very present throughout. In fact, the soundtrack was so effective, it was difficult to bear at times.
Over the years, I’ve often wrestled with how the Holocaust could happen. I look at old photos of SS employees hanging out, laughing, and playing instruments after work as if they had just clocked out of their job at a car factory. Similarly, I see old lynching photos of white American fathers and mothers and youth smiling before the camera in front of dangling, mutilated Black bodies, even taking body parts home as souvenirs. It boggles the mind.
But the powerful impact of The Zone of Interest lies not in simply recalling the past, but in convicting us of our own capacity for evil. The film director, Jonathan Glazer, says he intended to create a movie we can see ourselves in. We can see “something primordial, something [about] the human capacity for violence that we have as a species, and the familiarity of these perpetrators . . . They weren’t anomalies. They were normal people who step by step became mass murderers.”
No people group is exempt from this propensity to casually observe another’s suffering, even people who have been oppressed themselves. Such callousness can occur in the everyday routine of a job. One Black female judge in the south, who has no doubt suffered racism and sexism in her life, nevertheless, denied asylum to those who had been tortured or faced imminent danger if deported. More blatantly, Black pastor, Mark Burns, who is running for Congress and was endorsed by Trump, has called for the execution of LGBTQ people. And Israel, a nation of Holocaust survivors, which has the right to exist and defend itself, has nevertheless perpetrated its own injustices. The U.S. government acknowledges its ally’s human rights violations against Palestinians, including “unlawful or arbitrary killings; arbitrary or unjust detention . . . arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, family, and home; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and association” and more.
Some years ago, I read an essay by a friend of mine that has stuck with me. Dr. Katherine Wilson, a genocide scholar wrote, “A knee-jerk tendency to characterize perpetrators as monsters holds a logical trap: we dehumanize the dehumanizers. And so a cycle continues . . . what if we were willing to identify with the so-called ‘monster’ rather than the victim? What commonalities might we find? While surely uncomfortable, such an identification might actually cause us to consider more seriously our current habits of consumption.” The Zone of Interest prompts us to recognize our commonalities with “monsters.” Any of us can succumb to evil more readily than we like to think.
At the end of the day, most of us are primarily concerned with our own well-being, even at the expense of others. We will center our own interests despite knowing it may contribute to great evil. We delude ourselves into thinking we are different than those “monsters.” But in reality there are no monsters, there is only us, ordinary human beings who make terrible decisions. If we’re honest, not many of us would choose to fight evil if it meant disrupting our own comfort, let alone losing our own lives. That’s why even though we say, “Never again,” the same things happens over and over. History does repeat itself, and it’s not because we have forgotten what happened. Rather it takes great courage to resist evil. Self-sacrifice is counter-intuitive to our instinct for survival and comfort.
This brings us back to The Zone of Interest. Amid the Höss family’s acceptance of horror as they enjoy their idyllic daily life, we see a brief glimpse into another family. A young Polish girl who lives nearby risks her own life by going out at night to hide apples for the concentration camp prisoners (based on a true story). It’s a small but profound act. She does not have power to overthrow Hitler, but she does what she can to alleviate the suffering near her.
We often feel helpless and afraid in the face of great evil, especially when thousands can protest or march for change and nothing seems to result. But we are still called to be a prophetic voice even when no one listens (Jer 38; Matt 21; Matt 23). We can defeat “over-whelm paralysis” and take real action. I think of Sophie Scholl, a college student, and her friends secretly printing flyers against the Nazi government and spreading them around their school and town. They were eventually caught, but shortly before Sophie was beheaded by guillotine, she said, “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause.” Sophie was only 21 years old. She didn’t personally defeat Hitler, but she did what she could with what she had and her prophetic voice still rings out.
The Zone of Interest reminds us that the first step in resisting evil is recognizing our own capacity to rationalize violence or passively observe harm. In this way, the film is contemplative, prompting self-reflection and sober-mindedness. Secondly, the film offers a glimpse into what courageous resistance looks like. A small, insignificant person can choose to act against a Goliath. Yes, it could cost our life or comfort. But if we claim to be followers of a just and loving God, we can do nothing less.
Watch The Zone of Interest and reflect on these questions:
1. What current propensity toward self-interest leads you to disregard others?
2. What people group do you dislike and are tempted to dehumanize (e.g. people who differ from you politically, religiously, ethnically, culturally, etc.)?
3. What small act can you take to help others who are not necessarily in your people group?