After completing her undergraduate degree, Angela Davis set sail for Germany as “Watts was burning” to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy. Upon arriving in West Germany, she looked for a room to rent; however, she kept facing agencies who told her, “Es tut uns leid, aber wir haben keine Zimmer für Ausländer.” Essentially, they told Davis they did not rent rooms to foreigners, and Davis points out that this statement, to her, implied, “Our rooms are only for good Aryans,” not a Black American.

Thinking about this experience, Davis points out that her arrival in West Germany comes twenty years following the end of World War II and twenty years, in the grand scheme of historical time, is not that long. She writes, “half the people I saw on the streets, and practically all the adults, had gone through the experience of Hitler. And in West Germany, unlike the German Democratic Republic, there had been no determined campaign to attack the fascist and racist attitudes that had become so deeply embedded.” Davis points out that the “historical closure” of World War II happened and the Nuremberg trials occurred and Adolf Eichmann’s trial occurred, but those things, those reparative acts, did not suddenly wipe clean the deep rooted “fascist and racist attitudes” of the people she interacted with on a daily basis in 1965.

Davis’ comments make me think about Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), a film about Rudolph Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz in 1943, and his wife and and five children living in the commandant’s house, in a seemingly, to them, idyllic setting immediately next to the barracks, crematoriums, and appellplatz inside of Auschwitz. Höss and his family have a lush garden, they go horseback riding, swimming in the Soła and Vistula, canoeing, fishing, and leading a carefree life. While it is a film about the Holocaust, Stephanie Zacharek points out “[i]t’s also a movie about marital companionship, about wanting the best for your children, about following the rules and working hard and feeling that you truly deserve the best in life. It’s about all the things that most people in the world want, entwined with the unspeakable.”

By focusing on Höss’s family and their aspirational achievement and success, The Zone of Interest focuses on the everyday lives of the family as the atrocities of the Holocaust take place just over the wall that lines their property. It is, as Zacharek points out, “possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way.” It’s not that we, as an audience, don’t know what is taking place on the other side of the wall when Höss goes to work. We hear the constant rumbling of the crematoriums in the background. We hear gun shots and screams. We see the chimneys and flames, fueled by human beings, licking the sky, illuminating in in a yellow and orange glow at night. We see captives spreading ashes as fertilizer on the Höss family garden. We see Höss’s wife, Hedwig, select clothes and items from a recent train load of deportees destined for the crematorium. We see Höss’s oldest son Klaus examining his collection of teeth pulled from individuals whose flesh and bones fueled the fires of the crematoriums. We see his daughters reading guestbook entries from Nazis who visited the Höss family at their home and gushed over its luxuriousness and idyllic feel. We see all of this and know that everything comes from individuals murdered over the wall. As Hedwig shows her mother their garden, she says, “The Jews are over the wall,” before continuing and saying that they “planted more vines at the back to grow and cover it.”

The mundane nature of The Zone of Interest is what makes it truly disturbing. The everyday existence of Höss’s family amidst so much violence and murder makes it disturbing. The ability to live life, as if everything is normal, in the face of the Holocaust, as a perpetrator of the Holocaust, makes it disturbing. I think about Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem here when she writes about the friendship between Höss and Adolf Eichmann. Arendt writes that that the two “had a very friendly relationship,” and when Eichmann visited Auschwitz it was easy for Höss to spare “him the gruesome sights.” Arendt continues by stating, “[Eichmann] never actually attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing process, or the selection of those fit for work . . . He saw just enough to be fully informed of how the destruction machinery worked.” Eichmann knew what happened inside Auschwitz, yet he still participated in the execution of millions.

Watching Höss and his family, I also think about Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. From Hungary, when the Nazis invaded in 1944, the deported Nyiszli and other Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Once there, Nyiszli was spared death and ended up working under Josef Mengele as part of the Sonderkommando. Nyiszli details his time in Auschwitz, and he does not gloss over the atrocities he saw and experienced during his time there. At multiple points, Nyiszli relates stories of German SS officers and other callously murdering individuals in various ways.

After a group of individuals are gassed to death, Nyiszli and others find a sixteen year-old girl gasping for air beneath the pile of dead corpses in the chamber. They administer first aid, working to save her life, and Nyiszli provides injections to save her. After this, Nyiszli argues with Oberscharführer Erich Mussfeld for the girl’s life. Afraid that the girl, due to her age, would tell anyone who would listen about “what she had lived through.” Mussfeld chose to kill her. Nyiszli writes, “Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck.” The young girl removed the detachment of mass murder in the gas chamber from the equation, and while Mussfeld wanted her dead, he did not commit the act himself.

All of this brings me back to Angela Davis’ comments and The Zone of Interest. Two scenes from the film stand out and drive home Davis’ comments that twenty years later countless people she passed on the street or interacted with took part in the Nazi regime and supported Hitler and his goals. One scene involves Höss taking two of his young children to the river to fish and swim. As the kinds swim near the bank, we see Höss standing mid-river with his fishing pole in the water. The camera rests on this serene scene for a while until Höss feels something against his leg and reaches down into the water where he pulls out what appears to be a jawbone. Nyiszli tells us that after cremation, a lot of the ashes got dumped into the Vistula. Höss, in a panic, runs towards his children. He puts them in the canoe, gets them home, and others thoroughly scrub them down lest they become infected by touching the remains of a Jewish individual. What do the young children thing? What do they know? They would only be in the 20s if Davis encountered them years later.

Another scene involves Klaus and his younger brother Johann. Playing near the pool, Klaus grabs Johann and drags him, as teh younger child kicks and screams, to the greenhouse. Klaus throws his brother inside and locks the door. We see see Johann at the door screaming as Klaus sits down, a stick in his hand, and mimics turning a valve and sounds of gas filling the greenhouse, thus playing as if he kills his brother in the gas chamber. Again, Klaus would be late 20s or early 30s if Davis would encounter him in 1965. His views could remain. He could be, as Arendt puts it when talking about so many Nazis after the war, be in a position of power. Arendt writes, “It is one thing to ferret out criminals and murderers from their hiding places, and it is another thing to find them prominent and flourishing in the public realm — to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administrations and, generally, in public offices whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime.”

All of this calls upon us to remember that the past, no matter how long ago we may thing it was, is still with us. The seeds sown and nurtured during times like enslavement, Jim, Crow, the Holocaust or . . . stay within the soil, landing on fertile ground from time to time, spawning new growth. The plants may have been pruned, and some may have been uprooted, but some remain and they continue to produce seeds. This is what we must never forget history and why we must face it head on in order to eradicate the seeds, to ensure that they do not spread and sprout forth from the dirt.