The Zone of Interest + T he Life of Joseph Wulf.

 

The beautiful Hoess family garden with watchtower
and other buildings in Auschwitz camp visible
beyond the walls

I recently saw this memorable film, The Zone of Interest,

Hedy and baby admiring the flowers

which shows the daily life of an upwardly mobile couple and their five children. Rudolf Hoess is the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife is Hedwig, Hedy, and throughout, the film shows their idyllic life with family picnics by the nearby river and wonderful days of play and fun in their huge and gorgeous garden lovingly tended by prisoner-gardeners and prized by the parents. Their exceptionally large and luxurious house is in the so-called Zone of Interest of Auschwitz camp and several thousand people who lived in this vicinity have been moved away for security reasons; only high-ranking SS officers and their families live near the camp now.

The house, a luxury villa, with
mature trees to screen the view
of the crematorium

The film never shows beyond the garden wall, built by Rudolf who had also had suitably placed mature trees planted to help obscure the  sight of the crematorium. This charming garden abuts the outer wall Auschwitz but there is a constant pall of dark smoke billowing from the unceasing chimneys of the death factory next-door and a constant background patchwork of menacing sounds: occasional guards shouting; thinner cries and screams of the prisoners; dogs barking; gunshot now and then. But Hedy and Rudy stroll contentedly in their spacious garden, admiring the roses and the lilacs while the children splash and play noisily in the small pool. The Hoess family hears only the sounds of contentment.

Rudolf Hoess
Admitted to killing 2 and a half
million Jews in Auschwitz

Rudolf, sentenced to prison for murder in his youth, is depicted as an efficient, high-level functionary totally committed to the cause of National Socialism; his single-minded devotion to Nazism has helped his swift rise through the ranks of the S.S. Hedwig loves gardening and especially her garden, but she also adores trying on her new, exceptionally beautiful, lush mink coat whose owner had gone up in smoke next-door. And she experiments happily with other booty; unknown perfumes in beautiful bottles and expensive lipsticks in golden cases. She knows she is lucky and screams angrily when a letter arrives which may send her husband to a promotion elsewhere. She is a kind mother and happy wife but says, conversationally to her maid,  

"

Hedwig Hoess
1908-1989

"I could have my husband spread your ashes over the fields of Babice.” She isn’t really threatening, just chatting.

The film score is by Mica Levi and it is sparse and at times chilling but always atmospheric. The film begins with a young, unknown Polish girl playing a simple melody. Because I had difficulty in understanding everything in the film with its dialogue in German, and the sub-titles displayed too briefly for me to catch everything, I searched online to find more and was not disappointed.

The Life of Joseph Wulf

Joseph Wulf 1908-1974

Before the music is played by the Polish girl, a voice speaking in Yiddish introduces the tune as the work of Joseph Wulf, composed in 1943 in Auschwitz 111. As the music begins, the lyrics, sung emotionally by Wulf, appear also as sub-titles in the sole example of direct Jewish testimony in the film. Wulf never wrote down the words or music but memorised both.

Polish girl playing Sunbeams in
The Zone of Interest.

Sunbeams, radiant and warm,

Human bodies, young and old;

And who are imprisoned here,

Our hearts are not yet cold.

Joseph Wulf, a German-Polish Jew born in Chemnitz in 1912 and raised in Krakow, had a rabbinical education but trained as an agronomist. His life changed utterly with the Nazi invasion when all the Jews of Krakow were rounded up and restricted to life in the Ghetto where life was overcrowded and harsh, although he did meet and made friends there with poet and songwriter, Mordecai Geburtig and painter, Abraham Neumann. Wulf eventually managed to escape and join the Resistance but was captured in 1943 and deported as slave labour to Buna-Monowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz. He vowed, if he survived, to commit his life to exposing Nazi war crimes. Wulf fled a death march in 1945 and spent the postwar years as a historian, chronicling, among other subjects, the Holocaust and showing how Nazi ideology had left its stamp on art. He also became a member of the Jewish Historical Commission and a co-founder, in Paris, of the Centre for the History of Polish Jews. He helped preserve the work of the already famous Gebirtig, and a lesser known composer, Jakub Weingarten, and made home recordings of his own songs, Sunbeams, and a sentimental song about his wife.

The execution of Rudolf Hoess
for  war crimes
in 19\46.

One of Joseph's many
publications.

He lived in post-war Paris but settled in Germany in the 1950s, publishing his first documentary on the Holocaust in German and campaigning to establish a research centre on the study of Nazism, in Wannsee where the Final Solution had been shaped. This met with resistance but it eventually came into existence in 1992 long after his death, with its library named after Wulf. On October 10, 1974, Wulf jumped from the window of his apartment in Berlin; a few months before his suicide, he had written to his son, despairing of how little impact his life’s work had had on German academics who believed that his scholarship as a Jewish survivor was biased.

“I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There can be the most democratic government in Bonn but the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses and grow flowers.”

It is a tiny but fitting tribute to Wulf that this much-acclaimed film is introduced by his words, music and voice which serve as a testimony to a life lived in some pain.

Postscript

Bret Werb, staff musicologist of the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, in 2002 came across the existence of recordings Wulf had made, in a dissertation footnote. Contacting the author, he discovered that the information had come from a documentary by German journalist, Henryk Broder who had Wulf’s actual tapes. Apparently, Wulf had organised community singing with other labourers in the camps with songs memorised but not written down. He recorded Hasidic melodies and songs by Geburtig and Weingarten between 1966 and 1967 in a West Berlin theatre, accompanied by Friedrich Schulz on piano. In July 2021, Bridget Samuels the music supervisor of The Zone of Interest contacted Werb looking for a piece of historical music, if possible, from Auschwitz and in Yiddish. Wulf’s little recording was the only possible candidate, most songs from the camps being in Polish. His music, played on the piano by a Polish girl, juxtaposed next to scenes of the Hoess family plundering desirable belongings of dead Jews, is portrayed as an expression of hope and spiritual resistance.

An historically interesting photograph
of Richard Baer, Josef Mengele and
Rudolf Hoess.
All did their share of trying to achieve
the Nazi Final Solution.

“We who are imprisoned here …

Are wakeful as the stars at night.

Souls afire, like the blazing sun

tearing, breaking through their pain

for soon we’ll see that waving flag,

   the flag for freedom yet to come.”

Romeo and Juliet

 

Tom Casey 
Romeo

Ophelia Charlesworth
Juliet

 

ROMEO AND JULIET

THEATRE ROYAL, BURY ST EDMUNDS

15^th Feb 2024 matinee

Benjamin Prudence.
Paris; Mercutio; Balthasar

Just seen the above performance in the beautiful Theatre Royal, and was amazed at how unexpectedly brilliant the drama was. There was a large school party in the stalls and the performance felt intended to appeal to just such a youthful audience. Checking up online I discover, to my delight, that this pacey and inventive version was created primarily to appeal to students and teachers of English and Drama. A brilliant idea in itself because to hook teenagers into Shakespeare on stage, is potentially life-changing for the students, and for teachers to be able to call upon such energy and youthfully inventive drama on stage to help present Shakespeare in an exciting way to youngsters, is incredibly helpful and inspiring. So often, Shakespeare at school for students is a boring, little understood ‘duty’ and course requirement, wearily worked through, appropriate quotations memorised, and the whole, discarded as quickly as possible. The pupil audience there today will not forget this Romeo and Juliet easily; nor will the many older theatregoers in the auditorium. Whatever the target audience for this production, the appreciation and enjoyment extended across a wide age range.

Mae Munuo
Benvolio; Friar; Associate Director

This energetic production with its loud modern music, inventive use of video, and six young actors recently graduated from various Schools of Drama, certainly hits the spot; the entire audience seemed to be thrilled with what they had just experienced. No actor seemed to speak his part; everyone shouted, called, expostulated, as they dashed hither and thither, energy bursting out of each leap and dash; each remark and question all caught mid-move. It felt young and real and, en passant. caught the essence of being young, and exciting, and on                                                      the threshold of life.

Online I discover afterwards that there are Directors of Sound Design; Video Design; Lighting; Fight; plus an Associate Director who is also in the cast. So, a lot of expertise and experience went quietly into this production when no one save the cast was looking! All credit to the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich for such innovative and far-reaching efforts, supported again, I believe, by Suffolk Council which has retracted its original proposal to stop funding theatre among other cultural activities. Perennially short of money, no doubt, but trying to do the right thing. Anyone responsible for supporting the New Wolsey would have been gratified to have seen this afternoon’s performance and the audience reaction.

Ciaran Forde
Capulet; Prince/; pothecary

Bethany O'Halloran
Lady Montague; Nurse; Tybalt; Friar

                                                       Little History of the Theatre Royal.

Theatre Royal was designed and built-in 1819 by William Wilkins. With many of its original features still intact, it is the last remaining Regency playhouse in the country and one of the most beautiful, intimate and historic theatres in the world. Theatre Royal’s designer, William Wilkins (1778-1839) was an architect of national repute responsible for the National Gallery in London and Downing College, Cambridge. He opened Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds on 11 October 1819. As the proprietor of the Norwich circuit, he employed a small company of players to undertake an annual tour of six theatres; Yarmouth, Ipswich, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds, Colchester and Kings Lynn. Each was open for just one or two short seasons during the year. Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds opened for the Great Fair in early October to mid-November and was only available for special events at other times of the year. At that time, it would certainly have enjoyed large audiences, particularly as the local community would not have been able to travel far for entertainment until the arrival of the railway in the 1840s.

Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds

Interior, Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds

 

 

                                                                           

 

 

La Fleur de la Jeunesse

 

My mind is full of artistic images and floral language as I read, ‘Monet: The Restless Vision’ and of the long, long years, though mainly in his extended old age, during which he gradually established his beloved Giverney with its expanding multi-floral, multi-layered gardens and waterways. Alongside this garden of delights, grew his immensely ambitious and ambitiously immense Grandes Decorations, his huge collection of outsize canvases portraying the movement and fluid shades and hues of the water and plants around him. “The ephemeral drifting lilies and dark downward coursing images of willows" flowed over hundred of canvases as he painted furiously, almost as though directed by an inner 

Claude Monet in one of his studios, in front of
part of his magnificent collection of Les
Grandes Decorations.

command. He began these late majestic works in 1912 and continued throughout WW1 and afterwards; in spite of sons fighting in Verdun; his enduring friendship with Clemenceau, an important French leader during the war, journalist, politician and eventually Prime Minister of France; and the relatively close proximity of war to Giverney, Monet from his mid-seventies cultivated this extended, all-surrounding canvas garden as if possessed, his efforts belying his age and increasing frailty. These monumental paintings were intended to form one connected artistic theme; he had stumbled on the idea of an extended range of canvases on the one subject painted in different moods and lights and weather, and had used the notion again and again to great effect. His series on Haystacks, Cathedrals, Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Poplar Trees were immensely admired and influential.

It is in reading Jackie Wullschlager’s wonderfully-researched and written hommage to Monet that I have been prompted to wander back into the thicket off my own life, partly instigated by my noticing again the three photographic portraits of my sisters and me taken, I think, in 1955. Suddenly I can see, and wish I could paint, the memory of those girlish birthday parties in July, in perpetual sun in memory, when perhaps a score of happy, chattering little girls sat around the long borrowed table on the small front lawn, to eat paste sandwiches and delve into squat tumblers full of striped jelly, fruit and custard. Over the years, we grew from these noisy party children to the photo stage of our lives, to “jeunes filles dans la fleur de la jeunesse, apparitions delicieuses et passageres.” [p187] A passage of time, too full and busy for us to notice our slow maturing at the time. Or perhaps, we merely took it all for granted. Living, day to day, was the thing!

*-The three photographs, were taken at 21, 19 and 15 by a local photographer who offered to take them for free; an offer not to be missed by a poor working class family! He needed photographic portraits to enter some competition which interested him and, as he lived near us, had thought that we would make suitable models. Looking at them now, seventy years later, I see the smooth beauty of the faces, the youthful trust and innocence personifying the transience of youth. Qualities I never ever consciously noted in the past; they were simply ‘our photos’ on the wall, chiefly unnoticed and unappreciated. Now I see that they are a metaphor for Life! I know of the maturing, the changes, the stages, the gains and the losses, the history of our lives, with much unnoticed or remarked upon. And now that both my sisters have gone, towards the end of my life, looking back is pleasurable, often painless; sometimes a little painful, while offering insight and a closer observation of formerly elusive moments; memories of dreams and dramas re-surface and add to the richness of life now.

Giverney, September 2023 when my grand-daughter
and I visited.

The Japanese Bridge as painted by Monet, part of his
Grandes Decorations.

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