I just finished watching The Zone of Interest (2024), which is loosely based on the novel with the same name written by Matin Amis. The film depicts the family life of Rudolf Höss and his wife at their home in Auschwitz, right next to the concentration camp.
The way the movie was depicted was incredibly uncomfortable for me. The most obvious is the ever-present sounds of the camp. While you hear the droning fire, the trains and cars, and the pained cries of the ones being executed, you never see the sources of these sounds directly. You can see the smoke from the train, you can see the fire shooting out of a chimney in the reflection of the window, and you can see the camp buildings looming just over the wall in the backyard of the Höss family home, but you never see the terrible things that happen. The people in the house talk about what happens in the camp, clearly understanding what is happening, but approach the topic so casually. The wife asks Rudolf to see if he can get her something from the people he is executing. A guest at the house is laughed at for thinking that a coat is from Canada when it is really from Kanada — a large warehouse the Nazis built to store confiscated possessions. One of the kids spends time looking at false teeth.
The film truly does an incredible job at showing the banality of evil.
I’m pretty sure this film, though loosely based on historical fiction, is essentially based on a true story. As far as I can tell, many of the details that happen in the story, from the location of the Höss family home to Hedwig’s and Rudolf Höss’s argument about his pending promotion were all things that actually happened.
According to the Times, this argument is based on testimony recently found in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which consulted on The Zone of Interest and makes an appearance in its closing moments.