The Hollywood Academy and the Cannes Film Festival do not normally converge in their understanding of cinema and very seldom coincide in their awards. Films that gain Oscars from the Academy tend to be entertaining, reward the protagonistâs individual endeavour and adhere to the traditional three-act narrative, often with a happy ending. By contrast, one unstated prerequisite of films put forward for competition in Cannes is originality, in either theme or style, or both.1 It thus came as a surprise to see Cannes and the Academy concur in their praise of LĂĄszlĂł Nemesâ opera prima, Son of Saul (Saul fia, 2015), which was awarded the Cannesâ Grand Prix in 2015 and an Oscar for one of the Academyâs most competitive categories, Film in a Foreign Language, in 2016. Even more remarkable was to hear Claude Lanzmannâs unambiguous praise of the film, which was as notable as it was rare. Lanzmann believes that Nemes â articulation of fiction and reality conveys effectively that the Holocaust will always remain beyond the realm of representation.2 This premise infused the production of his nine-and-a-half-hour documentary, Shoah , first released in 1985 and celebrated thereafter as a landmark in filmmaking and in Holocaust studies. Although belonging to different genres, Son of Saul and Shoah focus on the Sonderkommando , a category referred to by Lanzmann as âspokesmen for the deadâ.3 The Sonderkommandos â paradoxical legacy offers a suitable point of departure for a book whose main subject is the cinematic representations of unlikely struggles in occupied Europe during World War II .
Son of Saul rehearses details of a desperate mutiny of Auschwitz Sonderkommandos that took place on 7 October 1944, also the focus of an earlier film, Tim Blake Nelsonâs The Grey Zone (2001). Remarkably, this attempt to escape was not the only rebellion in Auschwitz, though it was the last one, taking place shortly before the camp was dismantled. The uprising itself, however, is marginal to Nemes â film, which centres on a manâs determination to have his âsonâ buried and a rabbi delivering the ritual mourning prayers, Kaddish , on his behalf. Relying on knowledge of the topography of Holocaust cinematography, Nemes limits the field of vision to what is seen by its protagonist, Sonderkommando Saul AuslĂ€nder (GĂ©za Röhrig), and the camera keeps large segments of the frame out of focus, zooming in and out from close-ups of Saul, making for an uncomfortable and unusual viewing experience. Alongside other Sonderkommandos, Saul guides unknowing victims to the gas chambers, sorts out and classifies their belongings, moves corpses, cleans the chambers of human debris and disposes of the ashes from the crematoria. The camera follows him closely, while the actions that we are familiar with take place not so much off scene as in its blurred margins. While this forecloses any form of voyeurism, audiences partake of the atmosphere through the sounds that the Sonderkommandos hear and the haptic perceptions suggested by the washed-out, neutral tones and textures of the environment, the clothing and the menâs hands. Viewers listen to this cacophony of voices while reflecting on the obsession of the protagonist, Saul, offered as a somehow distant point of identification.
As a Sonderkommando working in October 1944, Saul would be showing the way to the chambers to Jews from his own country, Hungary. Excluded from selection up to that point were the estimated 825,000 Hungarian Jews, many of whom were deported as soon as Hungarian leader, MiklĂłs Horthy, started negotiations to abandon the Axis in the spring of that year.4 Once de-selected from the ranks of those to be immediately killed, Sonderkommandos worked in the camps until exhaustion or illness rendered them MuselmĂ€nner , unfit or unable to perform the work required of them. At that time, normally only months from their internment, Sonderkommandos followed the route traced by those who had arrived with them. Sonderkommandos were thus a liminal category, between the living and the dead, starved, enslaved and routinely beaten up until they became despondent and lifeless MuselmĂ€nner, having given up on life, at which point they were murdered and replaced. A few Sonderkommandos, however, did survive, and their memoirs were determinant in the re-definition of Holocaust survivor from the 1970s onwards, as will be seen in Chap. 5 of this book, âHolocaust Testimony: Survivors, Ghosts and Revenants (1947â2002)â.
Primo Levi presents the Sonderkommandos as the paradigmatic example of the moral conundrum, which he describes as the Holocaustâs âgrey zone â, and as embodiments of âNational Socialismâs most demonic crimeâ. Soon after his release from Auschwitz, Levi dedicated a chapter of his first book, Se questo Ăš un uomo ( If this is a Man ), to the shock and degradation that awaited all internees when they received their first blows from other prisoners.5 The role assigned to Sonderkommandos , Levi argues, provides the best illustration of the Nazi âparoxysm of perfidiousness and hatredâ that designed a camp system in which âit must be the Jews who put Jews into the ovens, it must be shown that the Jews, the sub-race, the sub-men, bow to any and all humiliation, even to destroying themselvesâ. In this way, the German lowered the status of their victims, making them forcibly into perpetrators and robbing them of any trace of human dignity. This vision, in turn, created a circular logic in which the subhuman Jews became suitable for extermination. Leviâs last book, The Drowned and the Saved, expands on this analysis of the successful attempt âto shift onto othersâspecifically the victimsâthe burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocenceâ.6
The likes of Elie Wiesel , Levi, or Sonderkommandos Philip MĂŒller, Abraham Bomba or Rudolf Vrba, wrote or gave interviews about their experiences, foregrounding paradoxes inherent in Holocaust survival. Contemporaries, however, often classed Sonderkommandos as Jewish collaborators, as they did with the Jewish Councils or Jewish Police in ghettos, all of whom had a visible role in repression and in putting into effect the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. The contradictions inherent in their survival started to become known with a renewed interest in books such as Wieselâs Night or Leviâs If This is a Man, which did not meet immediate success on their release in the 1940s and 1950s. Finished before the end of 1946, Leviâs manuscript was initially rejected and then had 2000 copies printed by Franco Antonicelli the same year. This first edition only sold 1500 copies, in spite of receiving a positive review by Italo Calvino in the publication of the Italian Communist Party , LâUnitĂ .7 It was reprinted in 1958 by the Turin editor Giulio Einaudi, and has remained a bestseller ever since. An even more protracted process was followed by Wieselâs Night , which saw the light in 1958 as a reduced summary of an earlier 800-page manuscript, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), written in Yiddish and published in Argentina in 1956. It was reprinted in Paris in 1960 and later on in the same year in New York, where it only sold around 1000 copies in three years. Wiesel, who remained a human rights campaigner throughout this life, would go on to publish more than fifty books, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Night remains his most widely read work and has been widely translated.
Unrecognized and unrecognizable, Holocaust survivors were beset by contradictions and found it difficult to adjust to life in the liberationâs aftermath. Some, as Leviâs friend, Lorenzo Perrone, on whose generosity Levi depended for his survival in Auschwitz, descended into alcoholism, which led to his early death in 1952. Levi himself is thought to have committed suicide in 1987, while other survivors resumed their lives in countries other than their own.8 European Jews tried to put the past behind them but many returned to it to give testimony about their life experiences decades later. Lanzmannâs documentary , Shoah , famously broke some silences by interviewing Szymon Sre...