If you saw The Zone of Interest last year – the extraordinary film based on a novel by Martin Amis – about the family life of Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, directed by Jonathan Glazer, you will not want to miss this companion piece documentary, The Commandant’s Shadow, featuring Hans-Jurgen Höss (Rudolf’s son, now 87) and his grandson Kai Höss, a pastor from south Germany.
As counterweight, the film also includes Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the distinguished cellist who played in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, thereby securing her exclusion from the gas chambers, while Hans-Jurgen was an innocent child playing in the garden next door. We then get to meet Anita’s daughter, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, an eminent psychoanalytic psychotherapist who talks movingly about transgenerational trauma and how being the child of an Auschwitz survivor has shaped the entire course of her life.
