The Zones of Our Interest

One of the most profound films in recent years is Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest (2023). Adapted loosely from the novel by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest shows the life of Rudolf Höss, camp commandant at Auschwitz, and his family in German-occupied Poland in 1943. Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their children live in a lovely house with a nice garden, separated from the concentration camp and crematorium by a garden wall. On one side of the wall, life is bourgeois, rich in material goods, and filled with mostly peaceful domesticity. On the other side of the wall, men and women and children are murdered, their goods are taken from them, and ovens burn through the night. The film and novel are fiction, but Rudolf Höss and his family were real and did live in a house adjoining Auschwitz.