The Commandant's Shadow

After acquainting us with the histories of a Jewish Auschwitz survivor and the surviving descendants of that premier death camp's longest serving commandant, these improbable interlocutors sit down for a dialogue some eighty years after the fact. In essence, they convene their own miniature truth and reconciliation commission. Hopefully, they create a template that others in future can follow.

The commandant and his family are the same ones portrayed in La zone d'intérêt (2023), a gorgeous tour de force of filmmaking with surprisingly little to say, and in which rather little happens. (The lives of the Höss family did not get really interesting until after liberation.) That film was constructed on the premise that the phrase, "banality of evil" encapsulates some major insight about the Holocaust. Actually, evil's toxicity, seductiveness and delusion have more to do than its "banality" does. The two films taken together leave a far more lasting impression than either one can do separately.

A couple of key details need elucidation: It is not mentioned that Rudolf Höss was brought up to be a Catholic priest. Almost certainly, while he was on the lam in '45 and '46, he could have availed himself of the Catholic priest network that trafficked Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele to South America. Instead, he seemed reconciled and at peace with it being inappropriate for him to go on living.

Also, Rudolf's daughter, Püppi, had been a successful fashion model, married an American, became a US citizen, and held good retail ladies' wear jobs in her later years. Hedwig's death and interment happened in the US. Their family saga would make an interesting movie, resembling Nos merveilleuses années (2020).