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.”