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ABSTRACT
The essay analyzes the movie Son of Saul, a Hungarian film that immerses its viewers in the life of a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is not an easy film to watch as it presents the view from inside the world of the men who were forced to shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers and to dispose of their corpses, after first gleaning what was valuable from them. The essay explores questions about the limits of representation of the Holocaust, and it engages the ethical quandary that is at the heart of the film: the intense confrontation with the horrors of the Sonderkommando comes about by embracing a quest that involves betraying those who would (and did) communicate these horrors to the world. The essay also addresses Georges Didi-Huberman’s argument that Son of Saul presents a heroic revolt against the death factory at Birkenau, and it suggests instead that the film leads its audience to feel that it has faced evil and had the courage to confront the horrors it reveals, while actually turning away from the central challenges of grappling with the Holocaust.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 34, 158. Agamben’s book is a central philosophical text for thinking about the Muselmann. Agamben’s book explores the paradox that ‘the Muselmann is the complete witness’ ‘because there is testimony only where there is an impossibility of speaking, because there is a witness only where there has been desubjectification,’ and he ends the book with testimonies of ten ‘men who survived the condition of being Muselmänner and now seek to tell of it,’ 158, 165.
2 There were periodic selections among the men of the Sonderkommando – that is, selecting some of them to be killed – and only approximately eighty of the two thousand or so who worked in the Sonderkommando survived. But they were not all routinely killed every few months, as has often been written. Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams state in their recent book (which offers perhaps the most comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the Sonderkommando), ‘While periodic selections and expansions did take place, there were not the four-monthly liquidations of legend. The skills acquired by experienced members of the SK were too valuable for that’; Chare and Williams, Matters of Testimony, 6. See note 27 to their ‘Introduction’ (24) for a thorough discussion of the ‘myth’ that each Sonderkommando group was entirely liquidated every few months.
3 Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 53.
4 Levi’s chapter ‘The Gray Zone’ has been particularly important for later discussions of the Sonderkommando.
5 Didi-Huberman, Images, 3.
6 Shapiro, Carla Rose, “Film Review: Son of Saul,” 155. Shapiro, in her thoughtful, extensive, and at times quite harsh review of the film, argues that ‘Nemes’ representational approach, that of an experiential and immersive encounter, does not facilitate an understanding of the history of the Holocaust’ and that the film in places ‘elicits possible scopophilic responses’ (154). I would suggest in contrast that the ‘experiential and immersive’ qualities of the film are essential for one of the film’s central aims, that of getting us to see with rather than look at the Sonderkommando (or at least with one member, Saul). There is a very interesting discussion of the use of naked bodies in the film in an interview with the film’s costume designer, Edit Szücs, http://designisso.com/hu/2016/03/01/drama-a-designban-beszelgetes-az-oscar-dijas-saul-fia-jelmeztervezojevel-szucs-edittel/.
7 Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 53.
8 Levi’s discussion of this event is on 55-58; see also Nyiszli, Auschwitz, 114-120. Levi’s book, published in 1986, a year before his death, reads at times as written very close to the experiences of more than forty years earlier and at times as written at somewhat of a distance, as he supplements his own experiences with eyewitness accounts and scholarship by others, and probes the ethical implications of what he describes. Discussing Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone in this essay would distract from engaging with the important questions raised by Son of Saul. Nelson’s film is primarily concerned with trying to push the audience to consider how they would respond under the same circumstances (a question which I find presumptuous if not ridiculous). In order to make the moral ambiguity even more poignant, Nelson adds violent acts by members of the Sonderkommando for which there is no documented basis, such as beating a man to death for refusing to give up his watch on his way to the gas chamber. Adam Brown provides an extensive discussion of this film, and specifically of these questions that Nelson says he is raising: ‘“As an audience member you ask yourself, how would I have responded? What would I do to save my own life”’; Brown, Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews, 181. For further insightful discussions see Saxton, Haunted Images; Kerner, Film and the Holocaust; and McGlothlin, “The Doctor Is Different.”
9 For a description of the capacities of the gas chambers and crematoria, see Friedler, Siebert, and Kilian, Zeugen aus der Todeszone, 172. More generally, their book provides a good introduction to the work and experiences of the Sonderkommando (it has not been translated into English). Other particularly informative books are Gideon Greif’s They Wept Without Tears, which is based on his interviews with several members of the Sonderkommando, and Chare and Williams’s Matters of Testimony, which includes an excellent overview of scholarship on the Sonderkommando as well as an in-depth discussion of the Scrolls of Auschwitz, writings by members of the Sonderkommando that were buried and found after the war. There are several testimonies by members of the Sonderkommando in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and in the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, as well as books by survivors such as Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz and Shlomo Venezia’s Inside the Gas Chambers.
10 Höss, Death Dealer, 161. Greif also discusses this passage as an example of ‘how easily one can misrepresent the ostensibly callous and emotionally hardened Sonderkommando prisoners as moral degenerates,’ though his real target here is less Höss than ‘sweeping condemnations of the Sonderkommando, such as those propagated by Arendt’; Greif, We Wept Without Tears, 60.
11 Three fourths of the way through the film Saul’s friend asks him who the dead boy is and Saul says ‘My son.’ His friend replies, ‘But you have no son.’ Saul responds, ‘I do,’ and his friend seems to shake his head ‘no’; Son of Saul, 1:20:01-15. There are many moments early in the film, from when the boy is first discovered to when Saul first asks a rabbi for help in burying him (00:09:00-00:20:10), where it appears that Saul may know the boy but is not positive, and where we are left with an ambiguous impression (such as Saul asking others where that transport came from, and refusing to say the name of the boy when asked by the rabbi [00:20:05]).
12 Nemes’s acceptance speech can be viewed on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irrV-p_UCbc.
13 The soundtrack is to my mind one of the most impressive aspects of the film. One hears voices softly in the background in several languages (Yiddish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, German, Slovak, Czech, and French), and what these people say is not translated in the subtitles.
14 Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 50.
15 Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 51.
16 Didi-Huberman, Images, 3.
17 Didi-Huberman, Images, 3.
18 Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 55.
19 Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 55; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 26. Agamben states that this match ‘is the perfect and eternal cipher of the “gray zone,” which knows no time and is in every place,’ and helps explain ‘the anguish and shame of the survivors.’ Yet he misreads Levi, who did not write that Nyszli ‘took part’ in the soccer match, and he appears not to have consulted Nyszli’s book, where Nyszli’s account of briefly watching the match functions also as a defense against and a deflection of his own implication in the murder of Jews and of his close relation with Dr. Mengele; see Levi, Auschwitz, 68 and also 37, for further discussion of the ‘stadium’ at Auschwitz. Agamben’s stance – ‘If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will never be hope’ – seems to be a gesture of distancing himself from collaboration without really trying to understand the lives and activities of the Sonderkommando. British POWs, who were at Auschwitz III (camp E715, near I. G. Farben’s Buna works) did play soccer, most notably for a Red Cross visit, and did try to get their German guards ‘“to get a team together and play us … but they wouldn’t. Don’t forget most of the guards had been invalided back from the front line or were aged 50-plus’”; Jones, The Auschwitz Goalkeeper, 73.
20 The main translation in English, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, dates from 1985 and is incomplete. As Chare and Williams note: ‘Although interest in the writings, especially those of Zalman Gradowski. has increased in the twenty-first century in other countries, knowledge of them is still quite limited in the Anglophone world’; Chare and Williams, Matters of Testimony, 5. One example of their recent prominence is the space they are given at the end of the Holocaust gallery in the new POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in 2014 (this can also be seen in the catalogue of the core exhibition, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Polonsky, Polin, 342-345).
21 Son of Saul, 00:50:45-59.
22 See the opening of Antoine de Baecque’s interview with Nemes, ‘Entretien avec László Nemes’:
http://www.espace-1789.com/sites/default/files/film_files/DP-WEB_LE-FILS-DE-SAUL.pdf.
23 Son of Saul, 00:19:53-00:20:23. Saul repeats twice in a row ‘Du veyst,’ and the first time it is translated in the subtitles as ‘You should know’ and the second time as ‘You know it.’
24 For the significance of the Sonderkommando uprising for those in Auschwitz, see for example Laub, ‘Bearing Witness.’
25 Greif, We Wept Without Tears, 103, interviewing Josef Sackar. In Greif’s book there are more than half a dozen other references by different members of the Sonderkommando to being like robots. The question that provokes Sackar’s response is interestingly one asking him to explain why ‘Many survivors of the Sonderkommando have given me the same responses to the questions that I’ve been asking.’
26 Greif, We Wept Without Tears, 27. This is Gideon Greif’s phrase to describe the effect of Zalman Gradowski’s writings (part of the Scrolls of Auschwitz), but which really describes Greif’s central mission in his research on the Sonderkommando.
27 Didi-Huberman, Sortir du noir, 36.
28 Didi-Huberman, Sortir du noir, 37-38.
29 Son of Saul, 01:25:01-05. The person talking to Saul says ‘you two’ because Saul is walking with the ‘rabbi’ he grabbed from the transport. Someone has just said to Saul, ‘If he’s really a rabbi he should begin the prayer,’ and Saul ignores him.
30 Didi-Huberman, Sortir du noir, 33, 36.
31 This point is made early on in the film. Shortly after the discovery of the boy, Saul and the other men of his Sonderkommando group are sent into the undressing room to sort through the belongings of the Jews who have just been murdered. They are directed by the SS to look for valuables, and some members of the Sonderkommando are looking for gold that they can smuggle out. But Saul is looking only for information – looking through the identity papers of those just sent to the gas chamber, hoping to learn where they came from. László Nemes emphasizes this contrast in the commentary that comes with the American DVD of the film.
32 The film has received the praise of major figures, particularly the late Claude Lanzmann, who at times acted an arbiter of what counts as a proper approach to the Holocaust; such praise may strengthen the feeling that one has indeed experienced something essential about the Holocaust. See for instance this interview with Lanzmann shortly after the film premiered at Cannes:
http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2015/claude-lanzmann-le-fils-de-saul-est-l-anti-liste-de-schindler,127045.php. For an insightful discussion of the relation between Shoah and Son of Saul, and between Lanzmann and Nemes, see Portuges, ‘From Shoah to Son of Saul.’ For an excellent set of articles about the film, including an interview with the screenwriters (Clara Royer and László Nemes) and a discussion of its reception in France, see Mesnard, ‘Dossier. Le Fils de Saul.’
33 For a somewhat related argument, see Kapczynski’s “The Singular Jew,” 17, where she explores a recent ‘tendency to concentrate the story of Germany’s persecuted population in the figure of a lone Jewish character.’
34 Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 56-57.
35 Snyder, Bloodlands, 408.
36 Of course I am not suggesting that humanists, and everyone for that matter, should not work against the grain of Nazi attitudes, nor am I implying that the scholarly turn towards incorporating the perspectives and the testimony of the victims of the Holocaust – the ‘era of the witness’ as Annette Wieviorka has called it, in contrast to the earlier emphasis by Hilberg and others on privileging and using almost exclusively German archival sources – is wrongheaded. But the idea that embracing individual stories in some way counteracts the impulses and processes that led to mass extermination, or that the humanist in contrast to the scientist or scholar can supply the empathy or perform some sort of restoration that is otherwise lacking, ignores the much harder task facing humanist inquiry: that of profoundly understanding that which defies belief. How did a society succeed in dedicating a huge amount of its resources towards the pursuit of death rather than life, and towards killing millions of Jews, previously embedded in local communities, by viewing them not as people but as something else? I offer a fuller discussion of these questions in Wallen, “The Witness against the Archive.”
37 Near the beginning of his book Didi-Huberman analyzes the focal shifts in the opening sequence. He argues that Nemes puts ‘focus’ into question, and he suggests that this shot of Saul’s face is ‘Une image qui sort du noir’ [an image that comes out of the dark, out of the blackness, playing off the title of his book, Sortir du noir], 25.
38 See Murphy Mekado, “Laszlo Nemes Narrates a Scene from Son of Saul” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/movies/laszlo-nemes-narrates-a-scene-from-son-of-saul.html.
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Jeffrey Wallen
Jeffrey Wallen is a professor of comparative literature at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts (and was Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies from 2012-2015). He has also taught as a visiting professor at the Free University Berlin and at the University of Toulouse, and is the director of Hampshire’s semester-long study abroad program in Berlin. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature; on biography and literary portraiture; on testimony, Holocaust literature, and Berlin Jewish history; and on debates about education. His book Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture was published by the University of Minnesota Press. Some of his most recent publications are ‘Circuitous Journeys: The Migration of Objects and the Trusteeship of Memory’ (co-authored with Aubrey Pomerance), ‘The Witness Against the Archive: Towards a Microhistory of Christianstadt,’ ‘Testimony and Taboo: The Perverse Writings of Ka-Tzetnik 135633,’ ‘The Lure of the Archive: The Atlas Projects of Walid Raad,’ ‘Migrant Visions: The Scheunenviertel and Boyle Heights, Los Angeles,’ ‘Twemlow's Abyss,’ and ‘Narrative Tensions: The Eyewitness and the Archive.’ He is currently working on a study of the archive in contemporary thought and art.