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The Commandant’s Shadow (12A)
Directed by Daniela Volker
“IT is a fact my grandfather was the greatest mass murderer in human history,” states Kai Hoss, the grandson of Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant at Auschwitz who masterminded the killing of over a million Jews. The life he and his family led at the lush villa next to the concentration camp was featured in the Academy Award winning drama The Zone of Interest.
This powerful, gut-wrenching and terribly moving directorial debut documentary by Daniela Volker tells the story of the real people who lived there as it follows Hoss’s 87-year-old son Hans-Jurgen Hoss as he confronts his father’s horrific legacy for the first time.
“I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood,” he admits as photos of him and his siblings at that time show them laughing and smiling in the garden and by the swimming pool. Hans-Jurgen visits the villa with his son as he describes his happy life there. He insists he knew nothing of what was going on next door.
When he meets up with his sister in the US for the first time in 55 years, she tells him “we had a beautiful mother and father.” This gave me shivers.
Meanwhile in London 98-year-old Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch reveals how her cello saved her life as the women’s orchestra at the camp needed a cellist. Her father, a lawyer and WWI hero, and her mother, a violinist, were both killed.
“We were just a normal German family and then the lovely Mr Hitler appears, and we become an abnormal Jewish family.”
The film is interwoven with excerpts from Rudolf Hoss’s memoir, which he wrote behind bars, in which Hoss’s denial and ignorance about the Holocaust is chilling.
It builds up to the historic meeting between Hans-Jurgen and Anita in her London living room which is absolutely electrifying as she confronts him over his father in front of his son and her daughter, and he apologises to her.
Anita is an extraordinary and admirably brave woman. She is surprisingly strong and pragmatic. “It’s time to stop stupid hatred” she says. You are left in awe of her.
With the continuing rise of fascism and violence in the world today, sadly this is a film that still resonates, as clearly the lessons of the past have not been learnt.
In cinemas July 12
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