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December 1st, 2023 
Awake Goy THE ZONE OF INTEREST
Written and Directed by Jonathan Glazer
105 min. A24, 2023
The much-anticipated film The Zone of Interest, which opens in the United States on December 15, depicts a happy family living the good life, in a nice house where they entertain regularly which just happens to literally butt up against the outer wall of an open-air prison—where unseen people are tortured and killed.
They’re Nazis, living up against the walls of Auschwitz.
The Höss family is made up of sweet, white, pure, able-bodied, and innocent German lovers of nature. The petty, stupid wife, Helga, (brilliantly played by Sandra Hüller) spends her time throwing garden parties, whining to her husband, Rudolf (Christian Friedel) about when he’ll take her on vacation again, and trying on furs. For the time being, the battlefields of World War II are far away, and the Höss’s enjoyment of their bucolic lives is only partially marred from time to time by the screams of Jews on the other side of the wall (from whom Helga’s furs were probably stolen). Director Jonathan Glazer never really lets us see the Jews alive or what is happening to them—they only show dead up as sludge in the river, ruining the German kids’ aquatic playtime—though we do hear their screams when they’re shot and, in key moments, we see the orange light of the blazing fire which is burning just over the wall.
But despite their proximity to such suffering, even those punctuations don’t really keep the German family from living it up with pool parties; they don’t stop the children from leisurely dawdling aimlessly with human teeth, used as toys in the way kids in another time and place might play with jacks or Legos.
I saw the film at a screening on October 14, quickly organized by the film’s publicist for writers like me, just one week after Hamas broke out of the walls of the Gaza concentration camp in Operation Al Aqsa Flood when Hamas attacked residents in nearby towns like Sderot and at the Nova music festival.
Watching the film, the overwhelming message I received was this: If the Jews being shot and shoveled into ovens could just break through that wall, of course, they would kill anyone they found partying right on the other side of it! And, of course, they would take women and children hostage and drag them back into their hell inside if doing so would give them leverage to free their fellow Jews from torture and death!
This thought, of course, set in motion an obvious but taboo moral question in my mind about one of the most pressing matters of our time: Is it understandable why people in Gaza, similarly trapped behind a wall in a concentration camp and experiencing genocide, would kill or take hostage people they found partying on the other side of the wall holding them in?
Glazer’s film gives us a framework to explore this difficult question. And it pushes us to not only consider notions of guilt and innocence in acute times of genocide and war, but to also interrogate the complicity of day-to-day white family life in the global north and how it depends upon the subjugation of others.
Perhaps rather than diving right into this briar patch, it might be easier for us to begin by thinking about the legions of enslaved humans in Haiti who rose up and fought for their freedom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to win their freedom, who killed white people, including some who were not their direct enslavers. Or maybe, for those of us in the United States, it might be better to think about the scores of enslaved people who rebelled or ran away towards freedom in our nation, around the same time.
Imagine if those Black freedom seekers somehow escaped the brutality of whips. Picture them running away from the plantation of their oppression, only to stumble upon a cotillion full of southern belles: ladies of the manor who might not have personally whipped them like their husbands did, but who did, in fact, own them, benefitted from them and—if they screamed—would have them killed.
Would it be understandable if so-called “runaway slaves” killed the women before the women killed them? Or took the women hostage to secure the freedom of their children and friends still stuck on the plantation? (In an interview with Briahna Joy Gray on Bad Faith, Norman Finkelstein noted how antebellum white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who were Christian pacifists against violence, never condemned Nat Turner or his 1831 revolt against slavery, which killed more than 100 white people, including children; indeed, over time, people like John Brown and Nat Turner have become American folk heroes and the positive subjects of children’s books.)
Now, let us consider the uncomfortable, unavoidable question The Zone of Interest forces us to consider: Were the people dancing at the Nova rave near the apartheid wall around Gaza who were killed by Hamas (or, as reporting has now shown in Haaretz, possibly killed by the Israeli military) innocent civilians? Mere bystanders, who just had the bad fortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time?
Is Helga, in The Zone of Interest, an innocent civilian? As she models a fur that was likely as legitimately hers as the money Israeli soldiers have seized in Gaza?
It’s a different question than whether they deserved to be killed; as the writer Sarah Schulman recently wrote, “explanations are not excuses.” When I initially heard of the Hamas attackers labeled terrorists and all the Israelis they killed as innocent civilians, I wondered—were they all “civilians,” though? Even Israel admits that hundreds of those killed were soldiers or police officers. But among those not in uniform that day—except for children, foreign workers, conscientious objectors, Arabs, and Haredi Jews who are exempt—everyone else in Israel (of all genders) serves in the Israeli Occupation Force for two to three years from roughly age 18. Among them, everyone remains an IOF reservist until at least the age of 40 or later and can be activated at any time—as many now have been.
If no one in Gaza is a civilian—something which has been repeatedly implied or outright claimed by Israeli officials—is it fair to label everyone in Israel a civilian, given many are military reservists who have been active and soon again will be?
Despite not being active duty IOF soldiers on that day, the ravers at the Nova music festival were hardly people living outside of politics who were partying on neutral land. They were dancing on the site of razed villages, partying about three miles from the apartheid wall enclosing forcibly removed Palestinians in the world’s largest prison. For the revelers who were Israeli citizens, their right to party with an expectation of peace where they were dancing cannot be separated from the necropolitical power the Israeli state holds over everyone in Gaza and the West Bank not being in those spaces. As evidenced by the U.S.-backed Israel turning off Gaza’s access to water, fuel, food, communication, electricity, shelter, and medical care in the subsequent days—not to mention now killing 20,000 Palestinians, more than 8,000 of them children— the Israeli state wields, as Achille Mbembe described necropolitics, a total “capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
Given Israel has killed more than one out of every 200 people in Gaza, comparing what happens on the wrong side of its walls or Auschwitz’s is not sacrilege or hyperbole, certainly when you think about children. Approximately 232,000 children were sent to Auschwitz. By comparison, there are about one million children behind the walls of Gaza. Since October 7, estimates average that between 115 and 167 children per day have been killed—making the United Nations proclaim that Gaza is “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child” right now.
But what of the children of Sderot? Or the foreign tourists? Or the Thai workers? Those who are clearly not even reservists? I think of a headline of a Gideon Levy column in Haaretz: “Israel can’t imprison two million Gazans without paying a cruel price.” Without the occupation, those children and workers would never have been killed or kidnapped; it is the maintenance of the occupation causing the violence, not the resistance to the occupation.
This power dynamic is similar, as director Jonathan Glazer shows, to how the violence of concentration camps is the fault of those who placed Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and disabled people inside their walls.
Just outside the walls of Auschwitz, the patriarch of the family in The Zone of Interest is Rudolph Höss, who will eventually go on to run the camp.
But when we first meet him, Rudolph seems to be at the top of middle management while angling for a promotion. We see him working from his calm, comfortable home on a plan for an enormous, rotating oven, which he reviews as benignly as if he were figuring how to rotate people on a ride at Disneyland. During a lazy backyard party, when Rudolph tells his wife that he is to be transferred to oversee Hitler’s “final solution” and that they will be moving away, Helga flips out. She refuses to leave, citing how happy and healthy their children are.
In some ways, I found this scene to be the most damning in the film. It is easy enough to condemn Nazis partying while Jews are burned alive; but it is more difficult to sit with how Helga’s use of her children as cover for achieving and maintaining “the good life” comes at the expense of the suffering and death of those she considers racially inferior. She forces all of us to think about how often we justify sweeping people without homes, Black folks, Jews, trans people, or Palestinians out of sight and into ghettos with the excuse that we are doing it “for the good of the children.”
A key to understanding, and undoing, the kind of collective guilt Palestinians (or Black people or queer people) are presumed to embody is understanding, and undoing, how collective innocence is produced in dominant groups. And the excuse that “We’re just trying to provide for our kids!” Helga Höss clings to—well, it’s the same collective innocence which has been produced in antebellum families in the South, in settler families in Israel, and even in contemporary families living in segregated suburban America.
To me, the most fascinating character in The Zone of Interest is Helga’s mother (Imogen Kogge), a retired German cleaning lady whose daughter has “married up” into the highest Nazi ranks. When she visits the Höss household, her daughter shows off her backyard and says without irony that “they call me ‘the queen of Auschwitz.’” Looking at the wall, Helga’s mom wonders aloud if the Jewish family she used to clean for is now on the other side of it—just beyond the kiddie pool and flowers her daughter is so proud of. The mother seems unnerved.
(I sensed in the mother’s expression as she looked at the wall a feeling I had in 2008 when I first saw the apartheid wall in Jerusalem. I couldn’t believe what it was really doing until I saw it with my own eyes—and I was never the same after.)
Late that night, the mother is awakened by the sound of bullets and screams; getting up, her face is bathed in the orange light of the flames of Auschwitz—which are perhaps incinerating her former employer. Her room is upstairs in the house; perhaps she can actually see what is happening on the other side of the wall, even though the film’s audience cannot.
She departs the Höss household in the morning without saying a word, only leaving a note.
The next morning, Helga’s response is to accuse her unwitting Polish servant girl of mocking her by having set a place at the breakfast table for her mother, screaming at her to remove the dishes, and telling her she could have her husband kill her if she wanted.
Though we never see the note, I imagine it said something like, “You’ve become a monster Helga. I don’t recognize my own daughter, and this shit is too fucked up, even for me. Peace out.”
“This shit is too fucked up, even for me.”
This is a sentiment many an American citizen now has about the genocide unfurling behind the Gaza wall—many for the first time.
The Zone of Interest was first reviewed as a horror film in May when it was in competition at the Festival de Cannes. While it was made long before the current crisis, it reads much more specifically now.
For just as we never see any living Jews beyond the wall in The Zone of Interest, prior to October 7, many Americans had never seen any living Palestinians living beyond the Gaza apartheid wall, either. (Hell, we don’t even read Palestinians in their own words in the U.S. press.) For a generation, most Americans have only seen Israel (in person or on TV) from the safe side of the apartheid walls.
And if networks like CNN and ABC—which are embedding with the IOF—had their way, we still would not hear Palestinians in their own words.
But thanks to Al Jazeera and the ubiquity of cell phone video posted to social media, we are now seeing Palestinians. Social media has brought them into the American “zone of interest.” We are hearing their screams—primal shrieks as haunting as the David Lynch-like sounds Glazer subjects us to in the darkest shots of his film—and seeing how Palestinians are being burned alive in a concentration camp until their bodies are so charred, they’re unrecognizable as ever having been human.
We hear the gunshots. And we see a wretched, orange light—the same color of light that bathed Helga’s mother’s face in horror and shame. It’s the same color of light of the KKK burning crosses on Black Americans’ lawns, the same color temperature of the light burning from large barrels of homeless encampments the world over.
Indeed, after Gaza’s electricity was cut off, it is this color of lethal light that is often the sole source of illumination in the long Gaza nights.
On October 8, mere hours after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the editorial board of Haaretz bluntly wrote that Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War.”
If one of Israel’s leading newspapers can make such a claim, let’s return to questions I raised at the beginning of this essay: Who is to blame when people on fire burst out of the walls caging them in and chaos ensues: the people on fire, or the person who ordered them to be set on fire?
And if we can feel compassion towards a desperate people stuck inside a Nazi concentration camp, can we not feel compassion towards the mutineers on the Amistad, the Haitians who rose up against the French, the enslaved Black Americans who fought their way north, and towards the people of Palestine who are yearning to be free?
The Zone of Interest helped me clarify that for those of us who are United States taxpayers, we not only can feel such compassion; we also have a moral responsibility to turn off the supply of dollars, bullets, and phosphorus bombs that are burning flesh and cooking people alive just beyond the wall of Gaza.
Steven W. Thrasher
Steven W. Thrasher, Ph.D., is a professor at Northwestern University and the author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, which will be published in paperback in January.
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