With its three wins at the BAFTAs the other day, the British film, THE ZONE OF INTEREST, seems poised to take the Best International Feature Film award at the Oscars next month. Loosely based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, and written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, THE ZONE OF INTEREST is not your typical Holocaust film. There are no scenes of Jews being herded from cattle cars into the gas chambers and no story arcs of personal triumphs against all odds. In this story, what’s happening at Auschwitz is, for the most part, heard but not seen.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST focuses on Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel, soon to be seen in Season 3 of TV’s THE WHITE LOTUS), the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, ANATOMY OF A FALL; TONI ERDMANN) and their family. The Hösses live an idyllic life in a beautiful house with a beautiful garden that is separated from the concentration camp next door by a high concrete wall topped by a barbed wire fence that we know from history was electrified. Their lives are rather mundane. Rudolf rides off to work every morning on his horse and the children go off to school. Hedwig spends her days puttering around their garden and having tea with some of the other German wives whose husbands also work in the camp. Every few days she goes clothes shopping, which consists of rifling through a bag of items confiscated from the Jews who have been marched to their gruesome deaths. But that’s never talked about. In Hedwig’s world, the sun always shines even as the crematoria next door belch out smoke and ash all day long.

Without question, THE ZONE OF INTEREST is a powerful film in its portrayal of what Hannah Arendt famously termed “the banality of evil”. The Hösses are “terrifyingly normal”, as she referred to Adolph Eichmann. Though the sounds of gunfire, screams and barking dogs seep into their world, the Hösses ignore them or, worse, mislabel them. The only one in the family who has any slight bit of conscience left is Hedwig’s mother, who comes for a visit. Rather than commenting on it though, outside of a brief acknowledgement that her former Jewish employers have probably ended up next door, she just packs her bags and leaves when it gets too much to take. She, like most Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and others who lived under the Nazis, chooses to remain silent. I’m reminded of the time one of my classmates in university told me that her grandparents, who were Polish, were from Auschwitz, or Oświęcim, as the town is called in Polish. She told me that they never knew what was going on under their noses. At the time, I mentioned it to my mother who told me that this was impossible. Trains were coming and going at all hours, the sky was red with the flames coming from the crematoria, ashes rained down on them day in and day out (there’s a reason why Holocaust films about Auschwitz are always cloaked in grey), and the pervasive smell of burnt flesh was undeniable. Like Hedwig’s mother, my classmate’s grandparents instinctively knew but, at best, chose to ignore.

A recent poll revealed that 20 percent of Americans aged 18 – 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth. As shocking or troubling as this is (at least it is to me), young Americans are not alone in their ignorance. An earlier study done last year in the Netherlands found similar results there. In that study, 23% of Millennials and Gen-Zers in that country believe that the Holocaust is a myth or that the number of those murdered is greatly exaggerated. My great-grandfather and many of my cousins must be turning over in their graves. Oh, that’s right. They don’t have graves because they were gassed and then cremated in Treblinka and Auschwitz

And that’s the problem I have with this movie. It’s message is too obscure. I know what’s going on behind the wall that runs next to the Höss’ house but do the 20 – 25 percent of young Americans and Dutch (and, presumably, Canadians, Brits, Irish, French, Swedes, …)? And if they do know, do they understand the scale of the barbarity? THE ZONE OF INTEREST is a wonderful piece of art but it doesn’t educate. Instead it does a disservice to the memory of people like my ancestors whose lives were extinguished by the Nazis and their collaborators. It also won’t move the needle on Holocaust and tolerance education. As the saying goes, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

THE ZONE OF INTEREST opens in Hong Kong on Thursday (February 22nd).

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