Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest —a fictionalized study of the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp commandant whose family lived right beside his workplace—is a film about monstrous detachment, willful blindness, and moral rot. It’s apt, then, that The Commandant’s Shadow , a documentary about this true story, tackles similar themes, albeit from the unique perspective of the descendants of both Höss and one of the camp’s survivors. A powerful portrait of the need to face and investigate the past, and also the terrible difficulty of doing so, Daniela Völker’s non-fiction feature (May 29, in theaters) is an overpowering work of excavation and confrontation—as well as a timely and urgent warning about the continuing threat of antisemitism.
Hans Jürgen Höss had a happy upbringing alongside his siblings and his parents Rudolf and Hedwig, and at age 87, he claims that he knew little about what was going on outside the family’s Auschwitz villa, which sat less than 200 yards away from one of the concentration camp’s gas chambers. “As children we thought this was a prison and he was the boss,” he confides in The Commandant’s Shadow , further stating, “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz.” Though he seems sincere, his son Kai, a Christian preacher, cannot fathom his father’s supposed ignorance of the horrific events that took place next door to his home (the crematoriu.