#sonderkommando

[qupritsuvwix]

The greatest Holocaust movie ever made, starring Steve Buscemi, debuted on 9/11. It’s time to revisit it.

“The Grey Zone,” Tim Blake Nelson’s bleak drama about the moral dilemmas of the Sonderkommando, has been ignored for 20 years.

[casualarsonist]

Son of Saul review

When it comes to harrowing stories from World War Two, you can take your pick really - would you like to talk about the slaughter of seventeen million people, including six million Jews, during the Holocaust, or the Japanese mass-murder and mass-rape of up to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians known as The Rape Of Nanking, or the subjugation and enslavement of entire countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia at the hands of the German army? If these aren’t to your liking, there are plenty more to choose from, but no matter your choice, it’s beyond a doubt that the event is one of the most uniquely harrowing and well-depicted catastrophes in human history. And whilst some films have gone to lengths to portray the disturbing inhumanity of it all, few have delved into what might arguably be one of the most horrific stories of all - that of the Sonderkommando. Literally meaning ‘special unit’, Sonderkommando was typical Nazi doublespeak that applied to two separate and unrelated groups, the first a unit of the SS, and the second a work unit of Jewish men picked from the ranks of those imprisoned in concentration camps specifically for the purpose of disposal of the corpses of victims of the gas chambers. 

Yeah. 

They were forced on pain of death to work, with no warning in advance nor right to refuse the task given to them. Their first duty was usually to dispose of the corpses of their predecessors - an activity that clearly defines the Nazi’s keen mastery of creating an atmosphere of utter fear and hopelessness. This cycle of extermination was due to the fact that they held intimate knowledge of the terrible secret of the gas chambers, and thus they were kept separate from the rest of the camp and then killed when they had outlived their immediate usefulness. The Sonderkommando occupy one of the most terrible places in human history. Their stories were rarely shared outside the walls of the camps, both due to the Nazi’s effectiveness at disposing of the ‘evidence’ of their crimes, as well as the fact that survivors often wanted nothing more than to forget what they had experienced, but over time and through the thorough and relentless dissection of all aspects of the war a picture, a glimpse, of the hell they went through came to light. And here, in László Nemes’ film, Son of Saul, we are given a most personal insight into what that experience might have been. 

Hold onto your hats children, because this isn’t going to be fun. 

Son of Saul follows Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a Jewish-Hungarian prisoner and Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. The film begins amidst the action with a strict focus on Saul alone. In the background, blurred just beyond the peripheries of the camera’s eye we see the concrete walls, the incandescent bulbs in metal cages, the barking Nazi officers commanding herds of terrified and naked people into cramped rooms as they tell them that they’re just going in for a shower, before shutting heavy metal doors on them. Through it all, Saul keeps his eyes to the ground, or on the task before him. We hear the wailing, then the banging at the door, then the silence. We see the Sonderkommando collect the clothes that were left for collection under false pretences, and we see Saul scrubbing the floors of the chambers, washing blood and faeces and vomit away. We see him carting bodies out from the piles in which they fell. And we see a Nazi doctor as he coolly suffocates a child - a boy that accidentally survived the process. Without explanation, Saul offers to take the boy’s body to the prison doctor, a fellow Hungarian, who agrees not to perform an autopsy so that the boy may be given a Jewish burial. Thus begins Saul’s journey to offer one last act of respect to this boy. What instigates this compulsion, and why this child, of all things, is the one thing that compels a man dealing every day with the horror and despair of his work to risk his life is largely left hidden, and even when a reason is revealed it’s uncertain as to whether it’s true. But regardless of the reason behind his actions, the question at the heart of it all is simply this - what price does one put on retaining their own humanity? 

Röhrig’s understanding and portrayal of a man in unimaginable circumstances is an utter triumph of truth in cinema - both he and the film eschew all melodrama, offering nothing but discrete and sober emotion fighting against a world in which the only thing left to feel is despair, and as his journey progresses we are exposed to the minimalist sight of a human trying to claw his humanity back from a world that only exists to shred it away from him. Throughout the film Saul is largely impassive, but Röhrig doesn’t hide from the camera the decay of his character’s soul through his experiences, and through him we begin to learn the language of life in the camp and we see how these men hold on to (or in some cases, let go of) the little they have left in order to simply get through another day.

Through all this though, it never feels like the film is being dishonourable or disrespectful because in many ways Son of Saul is a horror film without gore, a war film without war, and a Holocaust film in which the Holocaust is barely seen. Don’t get me wrong - this film is relentless - but through much of it, Saul is one of the few agents in the camera’s focus, whilst the rest of the camp exists just outside of the frame or semi-obscured in the background. Most of what we experience of the outside world is forced on us by the incredible and devastating sound design, or hinted at in the periphery of the shot, something that would almost be more digestible if it were right there in front of us and we were able to accuse it of being exploitative. But like Saul himself, as much as one would wish to be able to shut out and ignore the things going on around him, the best one can do is divert their gaze. This method of training the audience’s focus is employed to its greatest effect in the opening scene, and allows the film to maintain a minimalist style elsewhere. We get no view of the greater goings on as we do in Schindler’s List, for example, but to be honest, had this isolated, focused, and personal story been diluted by extraneous attachments, Son of Saul wouldn’t be nearly as effective or as necessarily shattering. 

And I mean ‘necessarily’, because this is a rare and unflinching portrayal of one of the humanity’s worst moments inside of one of humanity’s worst moments - it should never, ever be forgotten that we did this to one another in the not-so-distant past. My girlfriend asked me what I was writing about, and I described the film and the details of the Sonderkommando to her. The look of disgust on her face said enough, but above everything it said ‘why would someone watch this?’, and Son of Saul is obviously not a film for everyone, but it remains one of the most important films that I have ever seen, as well as the hardest I have ever had to watch. But despite all that, it’s not gratuitous; it’s not brimming with violence or spectacle (like the utterly disingenuous Hacksaw Ridge), and it doesn’t stoop to depicting explicit suffering simply to elicit reflexive horror from the audience. Instead it depicts something worse - the true and internal degradation of a person’s connection with life through their forced participation in acts of unfathomable inhumanity. And this is harder to watch than something more blatant because rather than showing your eyes a crude recreation of a person dying, it forces its depictions upon senses that you can’t switch off - through sound, and through your imagination as you unconsciously create in your minds eye the things that are happening out of your field of view. And in this way the film shunts into into the position of the character you’re watching - someone who can’t simply close their eyes and be removed from the situation. 

This was the brutal cunning of the Nazis and the key to the true horror of their regime: in every way, their weapon of choice was terror - the complete immersion of their victims into lives of fear, and pain, and degradation, and death. And of course it does an utter disservice for me to compare, in any way, the experience of someone watching a movie to the experience of the men of the Sonderkommando, but of all the attempts to translate the unimaginable experiences of those that suffered in the concentration camps of World War Two, perhaps this film comes the closest to helping a modern audience understand. 

Son of Saul is devastating and invaluable. I’m compelled to say that it ought to be essential. As this world of ours travels further down a path towards enabling capricious leaders to make decisions that threaten entire countries and cultures and ethnicities, Son of Saul is a reminder of what we are when we stray towards the end of that road. For anyone who wishes to understand this sobering and terrifying reality, Son of Saul is more than worth watching - it is unforgettable.

Outstanding

9/10

[prosedumonde]

Il fallait tenter le tout pour le tout. Même si l’espoir était vain, nous étions tous convaincus qu’il valait mieux agir et être tués, plutôt que de mourir sans avoir rien tenté.

Shlomo Venezia, Sonderkommando. 

[prosedumonde]

Cela me réconforte de savoir que je ne parle pas dans le vide, car témoigner représente un sacrifice énorme. Ça ranime une souffrance lancinante qui ne me quitte jamais. Tout va bien et, tout d’un coup, je me sens désespéré. Dès que je ressens un peu de joie, quelque chose en moi se bloque immédiatement. C’est comme une tare intérieure ; je l’appelle la « maladie des survivants ». Ce n’est pas le typhus, la tuberculose ou les autres maladies qu’on a pu attraper. C’est une maladie qui nous ronge de l’intérieur et qui détruit tout sentiment de joie. Je la traîne depuis ce temps de souffrance dans le camp. Cette maladie ne me laisse jamais un moment de joie ou d’insouciance, c’est une humeur qui en permanence érode mes forces.

Shlomo Venezia, Sonderkommando.

[convivialdave]

All should read this. ALL...

[agnickradio]

Sonderkommando, μια ξεχωριστή ποιητική βραδιά στον χώρο του υπαίθριου θεάτρου Έξω Λακωνίων

από τη βραδιά στα Έξω Λακώνια Την Πέμπτη που μας πέρασε 25/7 συνέβη.  Continue reading Sonderkommando, μια ξεχωριστή ποιητική βραδιά στον χώρο του υπαίθριου θεάτρου Έξω Λακωνίων

Sonderkommando, μια ξεχωριστή ποιητική βραδιά στον χώρο του υπαίθριου θεάτρου Έξω Λακωνίων

[lejournaldupeintre]

Sonderkommando's photography - 5

Sonderkommando’s photography – 5

Ink on paper / 15 x 25 cm / Briat 2017 – –https://lejournaldupeintre2.wordpress.com/ Painting news project Les tableaux du peintre Twitter – – –https://lejournaldupeintre2.wordpress.com/ Painting news project Les tableaux du peintre Twitter – – – – – – – – – –

View On WordPress

[lejournaldupeintre]

Sonderkommando's photography - 4

Sonderkommando’s photography – 4

Ink on paper / 15 x 30 cm / Briat 2013 – –https://lejournaldupeintre2.wordpress.com/ Painting news project Les tableaux du peintre Twitter – – –https://lejournaldupeintre2.wordpress.com/ Painting news project Les tableaux du peintre Twitter – – – – – – – – – –

View On WordPress