Son of Saul

Son of Saul was the most important film on the Holocaust since Schindler’s list, and provides a more intimate, personal perspective.   Written and directed by Hungarian director Laszlo Memes, Son of Saul centers around the ordeals of Saul, a Sonderkommando (Jew pressed into working at a Nazi death camp) at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.   The film uses the similar technique of shaky, close up, hand held shots as Spielberg used in Saving Private Ryan to give the viewer the perspective of the prisoners.  You are taken inside the facility to see the mechanized industrialization of death that the Nazis imposed.  One is struck by how the Nazis treated the extermination of Jews  as if it were a mattress factory.  The Sonderkommandos helped herd men, women and children into the chambers, grimly stood outside the bolted doors and could hear the screams and pounding while deadly Xyclon B was suffused through the chamber.  The work crews were then charged with hauling the corpses (inhumanly referred to as “pieces” by the Germans) out of the chambers and scrubbing it down.  Memes mostly blurs out the piles of dead bodies so we are spared the worst of the horror, but the scenes  grip us—Meme forces us to see the dark reality of the Nazi death industry and its sick and twisted affront to humanity.

Saul Auslander grimly performs his duties but then he takes it upon himself to spare the corpse of a young boy, who he claims is his son, the indignity of the ovens, but rather makes it the focus of his existence to give the boy a proper Jewish burial.  While his fellow prisoners surreptitiously plot  an uprising, Saul surreptitiously tries to find a rabbi for a secret service.  Ironically, both activities carry the same risk--death at the hands of their captors.  On one level, Saul's quest seems irrational.  He should be putting his efforts toward helping his fellow prisoners plot an escape.  But viewed somewhat differently level, his focus is entirely understandable.  Part of our humanity is ritual around important life passages--birth, bar/bat mitzvah, first communion, marriage, anniversaries, and death. Saul has made it his purpose to bring humanity to one person in a world in which all humanity has been deliberately obliterated by the Nazis.  One is struck throughout the film by Saul's grit and grim steadfastness in the face of almost certain doom.

The release of this film last fall coincided with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. 70 years later, we are once again faced  a violent, malignant creed that is attacking the very things that make us human.  Pernicious branches of Islam in the form of ISIS and Boco Haram are menacing the globe threatening humanity just as the Nazis did 70 years ago.  Once again, the world has underestimated this movement just as it did the Third Reich.  Our president mocked them as merely the "J.V." and "guys in pickup trucks," as they took over huge territories in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, committing atrocities not seen since the Nazis-- beheadings, crucifixions, immolation, raping women, killing children... and perhaps the most abhorrent, declaring a fatwa against children afflicted Down's Syndrome.   In Paris and San Bernardino, they have shown an ability to take their murderous show on the road.  With their destruction of antiquities in Palmyra and their destruction of Iraq's oldest monastery, they are telling the world that all of the symbols of humanity are fair game for them.

The film Son of Saul is important because we can almost touch, smell, and hear the atrocities committed by an evil regime on an unimaginable scale.  Despite blurring some of the most ghastly parts, it is a film that will likely affect your emotional state for days.

But I can't help but wonder if was just the film that affected me, or the knowledge that it is happening again.   Not since the Nazis has humanity itself been assaulted in this way.  Once again, the civilized world reacts slowly and tepidly.