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Above and Against the Heroic


The movie Son of Saul, which has received very positive reviews, immerses us in a few days of the life of a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were responsible for helping shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers, and for disposing of their corpses, after first gleaning what was valuable from them (gold fillings, hair from the women). Primo Levi writes, “Conceiving and organizing these squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime.”

In the movie, we are almost always with the main character Saul, and we quickly come to sympathize with him, and with his quest to provide a proper Jewish burial for a boy who for a short time miraculously survived the gas chamber. Against the inhuman work of the Sonderkommando, and against the horrific killing enterprise of the Nazis, his quest comes across as a glimmer of purposefulness and dignity. His frantic efforts work against the logic in which dead people are called “pieces” and treated as objects to be quickly disposed of. He offers respect for the dead boy killed anonymously along with thousands of others (possibly his son, though others state he did not have a son), which perhaps also helps us to believe, as the director László Nemes said in his Academy Award acceptance speech, that “in the darkest hours of mankind, there is a voice within us that allows us to remain human.”

So why did I, from nearly the first moments, hope that Saul would quickly fail (though knowing of course that couldn’t happen early on in a 107-minute movie)? Why was I rooting against him, and pained that I was being impelled and coerced to care about him? It was not because I felt that we were being asked to sympathize with those who represent “an extreme case of collaboration,” to cite Primo Levi’s discussion of the Sonderkommando in “The Gray Zone.” Nor that I felt the film crosses some border of what should be represented about the camps, or what experiences can be conveyed to the viewer, or because (to quote Levi again) it is “almost impossible, to form an image for ourselves of how these men lived day by day” and therefore any film attempting to do so will be voyeuristic and misguided. I crossed that boundary long ago in a scholarly fashion, watching several testimonies of surviving members of the Sonderkommando, reading their books and many articles and books about them, and writing on the topic as well.

From the beginning, Saul is working at cross purposes with some other members of the Sonderkommando, trying to find a rabbi to bury his “son,” but refusing to tell his comrades and friends what he is up to. And it’s not that the others are selfishly looking out only for their own good, trying to get a little more food or valuables for themselves. Quite the reverse. Early on, Saul’s intensity and purposefulness butts up against a group of Sonderkommando who are trying to take photographs of the gas chambers. Saul’s single-minded quest and lack of concern for what they are trying to achieve nearly jeopardizes their plans, though in a lucky break he does succeed in hiding their camera. What most viewers may not know—though Nemes is acutely aware of this—is that such a photographic project did succeed. Four pictures were smuggled out of Auschwitz-Birkenau towards the end of the summer of 1944 and reached the Polish underground. Georges Didi-Huberman writes of them, “Those shreds are at the same time more precious and less comforting than all possible works of art, snatched as they were from a world bent on their impossibility.”

Set against their efforts to let the world know about the gas chambers, and to use their privileged and hideous position in the camp for some greater purpose, Saul’s quest is quixotic, personal, selfish, if not meaningless. It masquerades as being communal, carrying on tradition (Jewish burial practices have been integral to Jewish communities), revolting against the horror and despair of Sonderkommando work by treating one corpse humanely and with dignity. Yet Saul refuses to share his obsession with anyone, and while continually in the company of others (he never has any solitude) he violates communal solidarity at every point.

And it only gets worse, repeatedly. Saul, like Forest Gump, comes into contact with each of the moments of greatest heroism and significance—for us in the future, but also for other inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau—of Sonderkommando action and resistance. In addition to photographing the gas chambers, there were those who succeeded in documenting their experiences and in preserving their testimony (the so-called Scrolls of Auschwitz; their writings were buried in the grounds of the crematoria and recovered after the war, though they were killed), and in October, 1944 there was the Sonderkommando revolt, which partially destroyed one crematorium. In his intensity, Saul has no concern for others; almost gratuitously he threatens one of the people who is writing a journal that he’ll tell on him to the Germans if that person doesn’t help him with an aspect of the burial of his son. In a film that it is about witnessing—the film knowledgeably and insightfully works to convey to us the unimaginable, “how these men lived day by day”—the main character betrays whenever it suits him those who seek to bear witness.

Saul unswervingly places his attempt to treat with respect one dead boy ahead of the lives of others. He tries to get the one person he’s been told is a rabbi to do his bidding, and when that man refuses, Saul throws his shovel out into the water, where the man then gets shot and killed trying to retrieve it. This group of prisoners was in the midst of shoveling the ashes of the murdered and cremated Jews into the river—the movie is historically scrupulous in documenting the dehumanizing activities of the Sonderkommando.

Later, Saul finds himself in the middle of the plot to smuggle explosives to be used in the Sonderkommando uprising. In contrast to the heroism of someone like Roza Robota, who was hanged for her role in smuggling explosives to members of the Sonderkommando and who refused under torture to reveal the names of her co-conspirators, Saul can’t even be bothered to keep track of the explosives that a woman gives him at great risk, and loses the packet when fanatically searching for a rabbi among a new transport of Jews about to be gassed. This latest attempt is as futile as his earlier ones. The man doesn’t seem to be a rabbi—or even minimally acquainted with Jewish observances. He can’t get beyond Yisgadal v’yiskadash, the first two words of the “Mourner’s Kaddish.”

The constant tensions that I have laid out here between Saul’s personal quest and the coordinated attempts at resistance and rebellion by others are apparent to viewers of the film, yet they are also covered over. We go along without acknowledging that we’ve taken the side of someone who at each point places himself above and against the heroic and truly significant work of a few members of the Sonderkommando.

What concerns us instead is, will he or won’t he succeed? The plans of others appear as mere hindrances, or else as opportunities to be seized in carrying out his own plan. Perhaps worse, Saul’s purposefulness comes across as purer than these other quests, in its radical negation of their actual situation. A proper burial for an individual is what mass murder denies and eliminates; the others are only trying to expose to the outside world what is actually taking place, or to hinder its operation. We are always in communion with Saul—we are continually looking at his somber face—and our privileged access to him, and to the hidden world of the Sonderkommando, works to elevate his refusal to communicate with his fellows. Kant defined the aesthetic as “purposiveness without purpose,” and it is placed above purposiveness with a purpose in The Critique of Judgment; seeking to achieve concrete ends would taint the aesthetic. Something similar operates here. Yet through our immersion in Auschwitz we nevertheless feel by the end that we have faced evil, and had the courage to confront what the film opens up to us.

The ending is equally troubling, but I’ll leave that for others to take up, as I think many viewers share this discomfort. The presence of a Polish boy outside the hut where the Sonderkommando escapees are resting (and about to be killed) finally leads Saul to smile and put aside his grimness. It’s as if the presence of a cherubic young Pole, who is of no interest to the SS killers, can take the place of the son he has lost, and give him renewed faith in the world. Should Saul’s smile lead us, too, to believe that “in the darkest hours of mankind, there is a voice within us that allows us to remain human”?


Jeffrey Wallen is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Hampshire College. Among other works, he is the author of Closed Encounters. Literary Politics and Public Culture.

           

 


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