The Shoah Abyss in the Detached Cinematography
The entire The Zone of Interest film by Jonathan Glazer is a muted cry over our people exterminated in the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators. And this is the main point of making it. Very just and timely point to make.
That Grey Concrete House
That great concrete house has bothered me for over a quarter of a century. I knew about it always, and saw it for the first time in the end of the 1990s when we started to visit Poland, Krakow and Auschwitz regularly for a number of reasons and projects. “And there, there is the house of the Auschwitz commandant Höss, the cursed house’ – our friend and colleague, great Polish cinematographer late Andrzej Jeziorek, the man who got his Oscar for everything non-fiction in The Schindler List, and who contributed at large to the Polish cinema in general and to the Holocaust theme in the world cinema, in particular, has told to my husband and myself on a sunny spring day when we were on our way to film at that embodiment of evil on the earth.
I filmed there several times and thoroughly. I know the landscape in, our and around. There are two things apart from the Auschwitz camp itself which did and still bother me in that never-to-be-cured place. Those oh-so-normal houses making a couple of villages in a close proximity of the giant fabric of death, and that great concrete house.
I never understood how people could live their own normal life in those houses, which was, still and will be a grotesque and unbearable contrast of good and evil to me. Irrelevantly from a pure geography and forced upon them circumstances. On this planet, there is barely such a thing as a pure geography, and if you are not an eating-sleeping physiological bio-machine, you can get your say and your reaction to the circumstances imposed upon yourself. Not always, but more often than people get comfort to think.
Since I saw that grey concrete house in the Oswieciem outskirts for the first time, a bit over a quarter of a century ago, I never understood why on earth it was not erased to the bottom after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 and thereafter. Continue Reading….
