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The real Auschwitz commandant — and Yiddish resistance song — behind ‘The Zone of Interest’
(JTA) – “The Zone of Interest” is not like other Holocaust movies.
Directed by British Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, the film initially appears to follow an unexceptional German family in the 1940s and their idyllic lifestyle in a cute cottage near a river. A father (Christian Friedel), a mother (Sandra Hüller) and their five children host parties, go swimming, tend to their garden and read bedtime stories at night.
Only gradually does the movie reveal that this family’s seemingly idyllic homeis located directly adjacent to the Auschwitz death camp — and that the patriarch is none other than Rudolf Höss, that camp’s real-life commandant, who directly oversaw the systematic murder of more than a million Jews, and perhaps many more. Audiences never see these murders, but they hear the horrific evidence of the slaughter: screams, gunshots and the machinery of the gas chambers.
“The Zone of Interest,” which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, never shows the inside of the camp’s operations. Yet it is still rooted firmly in historical realities about the Holocaust and in the minute details of how the Hösses lived comfortably alongside it, ignoring the mass suffering their father was orchestrating.
Glazer and his team did years of research before filming in an effort to capture the tonal disconnect of the moment, in perhaps the purest cinematic distillation yet of German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s famous proclamation about “the banality of evil.”
“I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural,” Glazer, who also adapted the script, told The New York Times about his depiction of the Hösses. “I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”
Here’s what you need to know about the new film, which is gathering awards buzz and has been shortlisted for the best international feature Oscar as it enters a limited theatrical release this month.
What is “The Zone of Interest” based on?
Glazer, whose previous films include “Under the Skin,” “Sexy Beast” and “Birth,” adapted his script for “The Zone of Interest” from the late British author Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same title. But the film differs considerably from the novel, and has a greater basis in historical fact.
While Amis’ novel followed multiple plotlines, including a love triangle, set in and around Auschwitz, Glazer’s script stripped away everything except the Höss family at its center. He also made his film about the real Höss family, whereas Amis (who died as the film was premiering at Cannes) had rendered fictional versions of them.
Glazer also went further, hiring researchers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland to look into details of the Höss family’s lifestyle. (The film was shot near the museum, in a formerly dilapidated house the production crew transformed into a replica of the actual Höss home.) He was also, he told The Times, inspired by sources like Timothy Snyder’s “Black Earth: The Holocaust As History And Warning,” and the writings of Gillian Rose.
Rudolf Höss, far right, is shown in a photograph with, from left, fellow SS officers Richard Baer and Dr. Josef Mengele, at Solahütte, the SS retreat outside of Auschwitz. (Karl Höcker album/U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Who was Rudolf Höss?
Rudolf Höss was the Nazi commandant who oversaw the mass killing operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau, having been posted there from 1940 until nearly the end of the war. Before Auschwitz, Höss — born Catholic and a World War I veteran who became a committed Nazi from the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power — was posted at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen camps, where he learned the tricks of the trade of mass death.
Within the Nazi upper ranks, Höss was considered, according to an SS report, a “true pioneer” for his mass-killing innovations at the camp, which became the deadliest site of the war under his watch. After the Final Solution began being implemented in 1941, Höss installed gas chambers and ovens at Auschwitz capable of killing thousands of people every hour and disposing of their bodies; from then on, the camp was a brutally efficient system of death. He was also the one who introduced the poisonous gas Zyklon B to the camps, impressing Adolf Eichmann.
As portrayed in the film, Höss was briefly transferred to a more administrative role within the Nazi Party in 1943 — a move that the family gardener has testified angered Rudolf’s wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), because she believed the family had everything they needed at Auschwitz. (Glazer has said that his need to understand this argument between the two of them was the driving force behind the film.) However, he was reassigned to the camp the following year to oversee the mass extermination of Hungarian Jewry in an operation named after him.
He went into hiding after the war, but was tracked down by Hanns Alexander, a German Jewish Nazi hunter, and stood trial in Poland in 1947, where he was sentenced to death. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency covered his trial at the time.
Höss admitted to his role in the genocide in a written statement in which he coldly describes the “improvements” his Auschwitz team made over similar extermination efforts at Treblinka — using the same dispassionate, removed cadence spoken by the movie’s version of Höss.
Höss was hanged in Auschwitz at the age of 45, on gallows he himself had ordered constructed at the camp.
The Höss family, depicted above in a scene from “The Zone of Interest,” tended a garden in their home on the edge of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. (Courtesy of A24)
What do we know about the Höss family?
The bulk of “The Zone of Interest” focuses not on the mass extermination, but rather on the particulars of Höss’ family life and the ways in which this Nazi clan mentally separated the two. As in the movie, the real Höss family lived in an impeccably maintained two-story house that bordered Auschwitz: They could see the prisoner blocks and crematoria from their upstairs window.
Rudolf and Hedwig saw themselves as homesteaders, fulfilling the Nazi ideal of reclaiming rural territory for the master race. While Rudolf went to work at the camps every morning, Hedwig busied herself with her social life and proudly accepted the moniker of “Queen of Auschwitz.” Historian Thomas Harding wrote about how they stocked their closets with clothes and jewelry seized from the Jews who were exterminated, and with the help of a large waitstaff, including some Auschwitz prisoners, they kept a garden, often entertained guests and swam and canoed on the nearby Sola River with their kids. (One scene in the movie depicts Rudolf hurrying his kids away from the river once he realizes it is full of human ash from the camps.)
After Rudolf was caught and hanged after the war, his family was free to go, but they were shunned by German society. One of his daughters, Brigitte, would later move to the U.S., where she worked for decades at a Washington, D.C. fashion store owned by Jews who had fled the Nazis after Kristallnacht, and her mother came to visit her frequently. In 2013, at the age of 80, Brigitte told Harding she hardly thought about her Auschwitz childhood, but that she recalled her father as “the nicest man in the world,” said she believed his confession had been coerced by the British, and doubted the reported death tolls at the camp.
What is the Yiddish song featured in the movie?
Late in the film, an unnamed character — likely a partisan — sits down at a piano to play a song with an unusual melody. The song is “Sunbeams,” a little-heard resistance song composed inside Auschwitz by the Polish Jewish prisoner Joseph Wulf. Though it is not sung out loud, the lyrics appear on the screen as the plaintive melody is played, and Wulf’s own voice (recorded in the late 1960s) introduces it.
Wulf wrote:
Sunbeams, radiant and warm
Human bodies, young and old
And who are imprisoned here,
Our hearts are yet not cold
According to the Forward, Glazer’s research team reached out to musicologists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum seeking obscure Yiddish music that had been written in Auschwitz.
Wulf himself survived the camp and a death march in 1945, settled in Germany in the 1950s and became a historian who tried to force German society to confront and account for the crimes of the Nazi regime. He also became a West Berlin correspondent for JTA.
Wulf spent his life trying to turn the site of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis formalized the Final Solution, into a Holocaust memorial that he would head up. But it didn’t happen in his lifetime. In 1974 he leaped to his death from his Berlin apartment.
In a note to his son, Wulf lamented: “I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect … The mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.”
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The post The real Auschwitz commandant — and Yiddish resistance song — behind ‘The Zone of Interest’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’
Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.
The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps.
March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”
“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”
Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”
“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added.
Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”
“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.
His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”
He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”
The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.
At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.
“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner.
He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.
Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.
“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said.
Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.
“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.
“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.
Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.
As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.
“The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.
The post ‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert
Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot
France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”
“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”
“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.
According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”
LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.
In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”
“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.
In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.
“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”
Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.
Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”
In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”
Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.
“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
The post French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education
US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.
US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.
“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”
The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”
The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.
“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”
Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.
For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”
At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.
NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.
“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”
He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”
NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.
Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”
The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”
From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.
Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.
“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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