The Zone of Interest

"Yes, the film is very different to the novel. The film is brilliant, really extraordinary, and the book is too but in a different way. It’s actually a difficult book to recommend because it almost falls into the category of can’t-look-away. He’s sort of written the unwrite-able, the almost incomprehensible. In the afterword, Amis explains how he found it really difficult to understand what he calls “the wild, fantastic disgrace of the Holocaust,” the “electric severity with which it repels our contact and our grip,” until he read an interview with Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in which he said that the actions of the Nazis should always remain beyond comprehension, because the act of comprehension is to in some way find justification for the actions. The ‘Zone of Interest’ of the title is the area immediately around Auschwitz, which here he calls Kat Zet. And it’s the banality of evil in all its unceasing mundanity, the concentration camp as workplace. You’ve got office politics, rivalries, romantic crushes. There are these three characters: Paul Doll, the camp commandant and a kind of psychopath, a hideous man; Angelus ‘Golo’ Thomsen, an employee of the camp who is preoccupied with his crush on Paul Doll’s wife, and who is morally ambivalent about the work he’s doing—it’s just a job; and then you’ve got Szmul, who is part of the Sonderkommando, prisoners in the camp who were given the job of disposing bodies from the gas chambers. They were spared death by being given this role, but they would be surrounded by death all day every day. “Primo Levi said that the actions of the Nazis should always remain beyond comprehension” What’s interesting about The Zone of Interest is the way each character tells the story. There are huge differences in style and tone and the language with which they describe their circumstances. For example, Szmul’s chapters are really short, quite abrupt, because he just doesn’t have the words for what he’s witness to. He uses these horrific procedural euphemisms to describe mass murder. Basically, he has been completely blunted by the horror of it. Then there’s Paul Doll, a grandiose sociopath, almost absurd. He says of Szmul’s work: “I never cease to marvel at the abyss of moral destitution to which certain human beings are willing to descend.”He sees himself as above Szmul, morally, because he’s just giving instructions. He can’t believe that people actually do them. He’s become completely removed from reality in a different way. It’s not a book to pick up if you’re looking for an easy read. It’s not a relaxing page turner. But it is absolutely brilliant. I think it’s one of his best books, an extraordinary achievement."