The banality of evil; writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt used this phrase to describe what she witnessed at the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the leaders of the Nazi regime in Germany and an organizer of the Holocaust.
That phrase came to mind when I experienced the movie, The Zone of
Interest, last week. To say that I “saw” the movie would not do justice
to the experience. The Zone of interest is an historical drama adapted
from the 2014 novel by Martin Amis. It is based on real events of
the protagonist, Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration
camp. The movie opens with a rather mundane scene of family life in what
appeared to be the 1940’s in Europe – probably Germany based on the language
the family spoke. As they live their lives there seems to be little out
of the ordinary – the very ordinary. They go about the routine of living
ordinary lives in a nice house which is surprisingly sparse – few pictures on
the wall or decorations of any kind. A servant girl who does not speak
and goes about her duties without comment by the housewife. The children
go off to school. A family pet, a black dog, wanders around without interacting
with the people in the house. A little peculiar but a life not particularly
out of the ordinary.
Slowly signs creep in that perhaps not all is well. We see a wall
in the well cared for garden which is eventually revealed as the concentration
camp. We hear sounds of what is happening behind those walls; occasional
gun shots, cries of pain and anguish, dark smoke pouring out of the many
smokestacks. The father takes the children to play in the river that runs
through this landscape. All is well until the father discovers something
in the river and panics and pulls the children out of the water, rushing home
to have them sanitized. This turns out to be a jawbone, apparently of one
of the prisoners in the camp who was exterminated. Reality encroaching on
an apparently banal family life.
The experience of watching the movie brought to mind one of the things I
saw visiting the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem when I was in the Holy Land in
2008. There was a short film on continual loop, showing a scene of people
enjoying a carnival outside a concentration camp, probably in prewar
Germany. The carnival was typical of the type of carnival that used to be
set up for short periods in a local park with rides and carnival music and
games of chance. I spent many happy hours in that carnival enjoying the
rides and games to the extent my limited funds would allow. The film
showed people having fun and apparently oblivious to what was happening on the
other side of the wall. The Zone of Interest showed a display of
hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of shoes taken from prisoners when they
arrived at the camp. This was similar to a display at the Holocaust
Museum which could not fail to move those who saw it as did many other
exhibits.
The question we are left with is, how could ordinary people sit by and
allow such evil to grow and thrive and infect the world. To draw on the
poet W.B. Yates, do we have eyes to see the “rough beast, its hour come round
at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Today, there is evidence
of that rough beast at work in Ukraine, in Israel, and in Gaza, and who knows
where else in the world. It is easy to not be moved when it is not on the
other side of the wall in our back yard and not be moved by the news in the
media that inundates our lives. People can be convinced that it doesn’t
matter, that the ones affected are not actually human beings like us. The
appearance of evil may be banal but the effect of it is not.
On our journeys, may we be blessed to have eyes to see what is happening
on the other side of the wall.
of the wall.
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