What is ‘The Zone of Interest’ about?

E. Rowell:  This article explores the theme of living in a culture in which the stranglehold of totalitarianism is being experienced by people who seek only the truth.  In the process of exploring this, Barr mentions the idea that many in the UK think a movie about the Holocaust is a movie about Gaza.  The idea that Gazans are experiencing genocide when it is exactly the opposite;  they are the committers of genocide, is shocking and disturbing.  When the truth can be turned on its head and lies viewed as the truth, society has been completely corrupted and infested with evil, just as it was in Nazi Germany.

By Andrew Barr, STIFF NECKED                                   13 March 2024

I’ve resisted writing before now about Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant and disturbing Holocaust film ‘The Zone of Interest’ because I thought its meaning was obvious. It’s about the daily lives of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife Hedwig. They live immediately next to the camp; the dividing wall is ever-present in the film. So are the sounds of the camp. But we don’t see what happens in the camp, because the Hösses ignore it and go on with their daily lives as though it were perfectly normal to have torture and mass murder taking place a few yards away from one’s home. The film carries an obvious message about the self-serving bourgeoisie caring only about the mundane details of their own lives and ignoring the horrors immediately on the other side of the wall.

The Sunday before last (3^rd March) I attended a panel discussion about Jewish history at what used to be called Jewish Book Week (now Book Week 24) in King’s Cross in London. On the panel was the famous Jewish historian Simon Schama, author of ‘The Story of the Jews’ and presenter of the BBC series of the same name. During the discussion, Schama brought up ‘The Zone of Interest’ and said that he didn’t like it because it was a Holocaust film from which the Jews had been removed. I did think it a bit ironical for someone speaking at a book festival from which the word ‘Jews’ had been removed to be criticising the apparent removal of Jews from a film about the Holocaust, but I also thought that if as eminent a Jewish historian as Schama appeared not to grasp the message the film, then maybe I did need to say more about my understanding of it.

I do appreciate why Jews might be nervous about a Holocaust film in which Jews don’t feature. For some, it’s about ownership of the Holocaust narrative, about making sure that Jews are always placed at the centre of the story, about insisting that the Jews have suffered more than any other group of people in history (which is moot since for a start more non-Jews than Jews were murdered in the Holocaust; not that it’s some kind of grisly competition).

For others, it’s a fear of Jews being written out of history through the medium of film. I recently watched (on television) ‘Selma’, the 2014 film of the story of the black civil rights marches in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. It’s a worthy if run-of-the-mill historical drama about a seminal episode in American political history – but it appalled me. Where were all the Jews who’d taken part? Where was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who had famously featured in the front row of the marches alongside Martin Luther King? His omission cannot have been accidental. The director went to the trouble of including nuns and an orthodox Christian priest. Considering its subject matter, the racism in ‘Selma’ is ironical, to say the least.

But Jews have not been excised from Zone of Interest. The writer and director Jonathan Glazer is a Jew. The Jews have been moved off camera, but we are painfully and continually aware of their presence. The focus of the film is not the Jews of Auschwitz. It’s focused on the Germans of Auschwitz and their attitude to the Jews.

Glazer has made it very clear in interviews that he didn’t intend his film to be seen as a historical drama but rather as a message about what’s happening today. ‘It’s not a history lesson,’ he told ‘Rolling Stone’. ‘It’s a warning.’

Many people, especially within the alternative media, have suggested that ‘The Zone of Interest’ is a message about what’s currently happening in Gaza. Support for this theory can be found in the public statements of Glazer and his producer James Wilson.

On 18^th February at the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) where ‘The Zone of Interest’ was (ironically) voted both Best British Film and Best Foreign Film, Wilson said he thought it showed how people stay focused on their own lives and ignore the suffering of others in wars, such as Gaza. He also cited the wars in Yemen and Ukraine (and the pogrom in Israel on 7^th October).

Wilson’s words were then spun (or deliberately misreported) in social media and elsewhere as saying that the film was intended as a message specifically about Gaza.

On 10^th March at the American Academy Awards (Oscars) where ‘The Zone of Interest’ was voted Best International Film, Glazer said that it shows what happens when people are dehumanised, and that the victims of the 7^th October pogrom and of the current war in Gaza are victims of dehumanisation.

Glazer also said that Israel had hijacked the memory of the Holocaust to justify its ‘occupation’ of Palestine, which provoked considerable controversy. I imagine he thought he was being measured because he didn’t use the word ‘genocide’ which is constantly on the lips of creative artists.

It’s always interesting to hear what an author thinks about his work, but once he has placed it in the public domain, he has no control over how it is received. Consumers can interpret films (and books and plays and paintings and all other artistic creations) howsoever they wish. Glazer’s and Wilson’s opinions about the relationship to subsequent events of a film they have already made are no more than that – opinions.

It’s a besetting sin of the modern world that most people want to be told what to think and can’t be bothered to look deeply enough into a topic to develop an opinion of their own. So when authors tell them how to interpret their work, they just accept it.

It’s also inevitable that many of those who see a film about people ignoring the horrors on the other side of a wall will project their current personal obsessions on to it. They will say that it’s a message about the issues that preoccupy them, and about how other people ignore these subjects – without noticing that it might also be a message about the issues they themselves are ignoring because of their preoccupation with their own obsessions. A lot of people are obsessed with Gaza at the moment.

Although clearly many people want to regard ‘The Zone of Interest’ as a message about Gaza, it could just as well be about those people who can see only Gaza and appear blind to human suffering in wars in other parts of the world, be it Ukraine or Yemen or Syria or Afghanistan or Ethiopia or Sudan or the Sahel or Burma. I don’t see tens of thousands of people marching every Saturday in the streets of London to call for ceasefires in these wars.

The obvious message of ‘The Zone of Interest’ is about people ignoring the horrors on the other side of the wall. So how can it be about Gaza? It would be preposterous to claim that people are ignoring what’s happening there. It’s never off the news.

The war in Gaza can be compared to the one in Ukraine which was the previous constant obsession of the media (in 2022-3). Yes, it’s horrendous, but it’s taking place in a foreign country and is one in which Britain and British soldiers are not (theoretically) involved. Do these foreign wars not serve as a distraction, to take away our focus from what’s happening here at home, where the walls of an electronic prison are being built all around us while we protest about events abroad, and where the sudden and allegedly inexplicable deaths of many thousands of people are ignored by the media and by the authorities? Whether they’re deliberate distractions, I don’t know.

‘The Zone of Interest’ was filmed in summer of 2021 under the restriction of ‘COVID protocols’. (This is mentioned in the credits). I can’t say so for certain about this film, but my encounters with people shooting other films and television dramas during this period would suggest that all those working on the film off-camera would have been instructed by their ‘COVID protocol advisor’ to wear face masks for the entire duration of the time they spent on set – usually very long days – and they would have been required either to have been vaccinated against COVID or to subject themselves to a regular (perhaps daily) programme of invasive testing. So the COVID issue would have been ever-present on the set.

The summer of 2021 was also the time when the COVID vaccine was being rolled out internationally, and people were being coerced into taking it under threat of losing their jobs (and, in the case of the film industry, never working again) if they didn’t. This coercion was a clear breach of the Nuremberg Code that had been promulgated in 1947 at the end of the trial of Nazi doctors who’d conducted cruel medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps. The Nuremberg Code outlawed any attempt to coerce anyone into taking part in a medical experiment without their express and informed consent. Nobody who took the COVID vaccines was informed of the risks they carried, so nobody was able to give their informed consent. The entire COVID vaccine rollout was a breach of the Nuremberg Code. The COVID vaccine issue provides a clear subtext to the filming of ‘The Zone of Interest’.

There are no accurate figures available for the number of people who have died worldwide as a result of the COVID vaccines – because the relevant data have deliberately been withheld from those experts who would be capable of producing such figures – but I’ve seen estimates of between six and seventeen million, which amazingly replicates the range of calculations for the total number of people murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust (the range depending on how many Gentiles as well as Jews are included in the tally of victims).

It seems to me that ‘The Zone of Interest’ is a film about people not noticing the horrors on the other side of the wall made by people who would appear not to have noticed the horrors on the other side of the wall.

There are many striking parallels between the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and what happened during COVID, not least the ostracism of Jews from German society during the 1930s, which can be compared to the ostracism of unvaccinated people from society during the vaccine rollout in 2021-2, and the characterisation of the Jews as a ‘virus’ which needed to be eradicated from the German body politic and which served as a pretext for the confinement of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps. I have written about these parallels before now, and will do so again. What’s relevant here is the similarity between the attitude of middle-class Germans (such as the Hösses) and the behaviour of middle-class people in Western countries during the COVID scare.

This is topic which (without referring to COVID) Glazer has certainly addressed. When he said that his film was meant as a ‘warning’ he was pointing out that we are not so very different from these people and that – given the right circumstances – we are perfectly capable of behaving in the same way as they did towards the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s not an original point, but Glazer’s genius is to have made this point through the medium of dramatic film.

What Glazer hasn’t noticed – or at least hasn’t mentioned publicly – is that these ‘right circumstances’ have very clearly presented themselves since the implementation of the COVID scare in 2020, and that middle-class people have indeed behaved in the same manner as Germans under the Nazi regime, and for the same reasons: because they have valued their social status and the approbation of their peers and their inclusion within the system more highly than the preservation of freedom or human rights, or indeed than human lives.

As in Nazi Germany, the majority of the population have allowed themselves to be persuaded by media and state propaganda to accept that it was somehow morally correct to countenance the removal of human rights and the gross perversion of medical ethics, and to look away from the manslaughter (or murder) and maiming of millions of people – and all for the very same justification that the Nazis had presented 80-90 years earlier, the eradication of a ‘virus’ that was supposedly threatening to undermine the basis of society. Just as in Nazi Germany, the mass of the public have stood by and silently acquiesced in the transformation of a liberal democracy into a fascist totalitarian technocracy.

‘The Zone of Interest’ is not so much a warning as a parable or allegory – another way of seeing what is happening right now.

Not surprisingly, many Jews have strong opinions about film treatments of the Holocaust. I know several who didn’t approve of the seminal ‘Schindler’s List’ because they thought it ‘too sanitised’ or ‘too Hollywood’ or even ‘too Christian’. I wonder if some don’t like ‘The Zone of Interest’ because they understand subconsciously what it’s telling us, and that’s somewhere they’re simply not prepared to go. It would undermine their entire worldview, so they make up a reason not to like it.

It’s often said that people who allowed themselves to fall for the COVID narrative did so not on account of reason but on account of emotion, and that because they have not been reasoned into their position they cannot be reasoned out of it: they can only be worked on through their emotions. ‘The Zone of Interest’ is a powerful film capable of triggering the emotional response necessary to wake people up to what’s happening in the world today. Everyone should see it.