Film still: Zone of Interest
The Zone of Interest and Hope for Humanity
Filmmaker Enid Tihanyi Zentelis, host of the podcast How My Grandmother Won WWII, offers her take on Jonathan Glazer's acclaimed new movie.
During World War II, the Nazis labeled the area surrounding Auschwitz the “zone of interest.” Similar to the term “concentration camp,” this banal, nondescript assignation was part of strategic normalizing of mass murder and systemic violence in support of fascism and its human hierarchies.
As I watched and listened to Jonathan Glazer’s vitally important film The Zone of Interest, all I wanted to do was reach into the cinematic space before me and strangle the characters on the screen. The characters in question are the Hoss family: Rudolph Hoss, the Nazi commandant in charge of Auschwitz, his wife, Hedwig Hoss, and their five small children (there are servants as well). I tamped down my rage and felt my blood pressure rising. I reminded myself to breathe. My mom was a Hungarian-Jewish child in hiding during the Holocaust and I grew up with the broken pieces of my family history embedded within. My grandfather Laszlo Tihanyi (Weisz) and my great-grandfather Sandor Vital (AKA Alexander) were both murdered in Auschwitz. I recently found their records from the camps and had an emotional discovery.