OPINION: The Commandant’s Shadow gives no easy answers but holds a glimmer of hope
Darren Richman reviews a documentary that attempts to grapple with why we are who we are in the shadow of the Holocaust
I have always thought of myself as a third generation “survivor” in the same way I am “eligible” to play for England, that is to say in name only.
Despite reading up on inherited trauma, it has always struck me as somewhat crass to suggest I am a survivor of anything when the only Jewish camps I experienced during my formative years involved songbooks and failed attempts to get off with girls.
Sobering stuff, undoubtedly, but a long way short of traumatising. The schnitzel was borderline inedible but it would be hard to argue my childhood was not a privileged one.
My thoughts on trans-generational trauma were upended by the extraordinary new documentary, The Commandant’s Shadow. Daniela Volker’s film focuses on Hans Jurgen Hoss, the octogenarian son of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss, the latter a man responsible for the deaths of more than a million people.
This is a dual narrative and equal focus is given to Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and the relationship she has with her daughter, Maya. This is the ideal companion piece to The Zone of Interest, getting inside the walls of Auschwitz and telling us the effect on the children of the man responsible for overseeing the operation as well as the consequences for those who endured it and their offspring.
I saw a Holocaust Educational Trust preview screening of the film with my mother. Like Maya, she is a second generation survivor who found her calling as a psychoanalyst. If The Zone of Interest was oblique by design, The Commandant’s Shadow looks at the myriad ways the sins of the father are passed down from generation to generation and the coping mechanisms adopted.
It is ultimately the story of four very different people and the ways in which their lives have been shaped by the monstrous acts of a man who has been dead for almost 80 years.
At the film’s outset, Hans Jurgen is in a state of denial and remembers his childhood fondly. His son, Kai, is attempting to atone for his grandfather’s actions with his work as a pastor. Anita, an accomplished cellist who was a member of the Women’s Orchestra of Aucshwitz, simply gets on with things and dwells little on the experiences of her youth. Maya, a specialist in trans=generational trauma, struggles to comprehend her mother’s nonchalance and seems more affected by the Holocaust than the woman who actually survived Auschwitz.
My own grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor like Anita, had the most optimistic attitude of any human being I’ve encountered.
His daughter and grandson, sat together in that screening room – not so much.
Zigi would constantly talk about how lucky he was, something I could never quite comprehend given he was born in 1930s Poland to an orthodox Jewish family. With luck like that, who needs misfortune? Inevitably, these were the thoughts swirling round my head in the aftermath of watching a film, years in the making, that attempts to grapple with why we are who we are in the shadow of the Holocaust.
The two strands of Volker’s film come together in startling fashion at the close of The Commandant’s Shadow. Hans Jurgen, unlike his sister, is willing to confront the past and goes beyond the walls of the family garden and into Auschwitz itself. He reads his father’s memoir and begins to understand the extend of the depravity. And finally, in a world in which so few of us are able to step outside our echo chambers, he sits down with Anita, Maya and his son in the former’s front room and they talk. These four people, who have been irrevocably moulded by one of history’s most infamous monsters, discuss forgiveness and the weight of the past.
“Never waste good pain” goes an old Yiddish proverb and, improbably, it is an adage that rings true for the son and grandson of a Nazi who made a more concerted attempt to enact the Final Solution than almost any other. In a way, all four of these people are survivors and Volker’s film suggests there may not be easy answers but there is, at the very least, hope. In these turbulent times, that is something worth clinging onto.
- Darren Richman is a writer and journalist
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