The Zone of Interest
On my flight from Australia to Europe I watched the remarkable film, The Zone of Interest.
As a person who centres everything around integrity, speaking with integrity, and standing for justice for all, I have also been fascinated by how evil happens. How do regular people become evil and do atrocious things?
I love the work of Hannah Arendt and her “Banality of Evil”—little atrocities, small seemingly innocuous transgressions that, repeated, become full-blown evil. Through little atrocities evil takes the persona of being normalised, one small act at a time.
The Zone of Interest is the most perfect artistic depiction of the banality of evil.
The family of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, live in a lovely house and garden behind the wall of Auschwitz.
The family goes about their pleasant lives while in the background chimneys pump their smoke into the sky day and night, the sounds of screams, of trains arriving and departing, and, I am sure, the always present smell of burning flesh.
The commandant’s wife, Hedwig, tries on a woman’s fur coat from the other side of the wall and then applies her lipstick. Women select the best clothing from a pile. We know where the pile of clothes comes from.
Hedwig portrays the most evil person I have ever witnessed on screen. She is a regular woman, she doesn’t wield a knife or a gun, she doesn’t torture. Her husband is clearly evil; he is the one supervising the deaths and selection, the volume of bodies to be cremated. Yet Hedwig’s evil lives in her complete disassociation from what is obviously happening, her delight in her life as a consequence of the terrifying deaths of millions just meters away, across a wall.
It is this characteristic that is so shocking. The normalisation. The banality.
Yet we see it all around us. People go back to safe lives knowing atrocities are happening. People who profit from the atrocities, even in some small way. People who destroy the food that is meant to aid those struggling to survive. I question how much I do this.
I see how easy it is to slip into this dark place. My comfortable life. My sweet existence. I do not want to look at the homeless on the streets as their numbers swell.
After the war ended, people said never again. But we are doing it again. It is even more tragic that some of those who were the most persecuted are now persecuting.
Photo Taken July 24th 2023
