Hungarian film director Laszlo Nemes clutched his Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film Sunday and addressed the theater full of famous faces. “You know, even in the darkest hours of mankind, there might be a voice within us that allows us to remain human. That’s the hope of this film.”
His World War II drama “Son of Saul” had already scooped up more than 30 awards worldwide, including a Golden Globe in January and the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival last May.
But for Nemes, using his debut feature to tell a Holocaust story was more than an artistic decision — it was personal.
“Almost 500,000 Hungarians were deported in 1944, in the record time of eight weeks, to be killed in Auschwitz,” told CNN earlier this month, “among them 100,000 children below 18. The part of my family that was deported to Auschwitz, these people never came back. So I think I had in me this sense of approaching the Holocaust, not from the point of view of survival, but of the point of view of people who were killed, who were taken from their homes and not knowing what would happen to them and then being killed.”
“Son of Saul” looks at the “Sonderkommando,” a special group of Jewish concentration camp prisoners who were forced to help the Nazis by removing the bodies of gas chamber victims, before the prisoners were themselves killed (there is no suggestion that the Sonderkommando participated in the killings).
The story focuses on Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, who discovers the body of a boy in the crematorium, thinks the remains are those of his son and tries to bury them. It seems an incongruous gesture while other members of the Sonderkommando are trying to rebel. During the war itself many of the group tried to organize rebellions in Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz; often they wrote notes about the horrors they experienced and buried them in the ground.
“The Sonderkommandos knew that they would be liquidated after a while because they were the so-called ‘bearers of secrets,'” Nemes says, “because they knew about the extermination and witnessed it firsthand.
“These people were trying to resist, and after the war they were considered in many cases as collaborators. I think now it’s changing a little bit and I think it will change a bit more because of this film, so that people don’t put blame on the victims and don’t share responsibility between victims and perpetrators, but should put the blame on the perpetrators. Because even if there were bad people among the prisoners, it doesn’t mean the responsibility for the Holocaust can be shared.”
“Son of Saul” is not the first feature about the Sonderkommando: see, for example, Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001 feature “The Grey Zone,” which starred David Arquette and Steve Buscemi, among others. Yet it stands out in a genre — the Holocaust drama — which Nemes accepts can make some people weary.
“Obviously there’s a lot of passion about it,” he says. “Some people say, ‘At last, a film like that!’ while some people say, ‘Why do we have to see another Holocaust movie?’ Even without knowing what the film represents as an approach, they just refuse it. That’s precisely why this kind of film has to be made, because there’s such a strong negative reaction in sizable portions of the population.”
“Son of Saul’s” viewpoint also makes it a standout, shot as it is in a claustrophobic style, virtually devoid of wide shots, with the camera seemingly perched on the protagonist’s shoulder or capturing his reaction to events around him. The audience is transported around the inside of the hellish concentration camp as the Sonderkommando carry out their work, almost zombie-like. It’s compelling, suffocating, exhausting.
That approach, Nemes explains, was deliberate. “Unlike other films on the subject, we really wanted to narrow the focus and to show basically a face, a human being, an individual in the midst of chaos and destruction. But by doing that we would rely more on the imagination of the viewer to hint at the enormity and scope of the suffering taking place. … In a sense it becomes a personal journey as you have to project your own soul into it. If you show less, you actually end up with a wider scope.”
Nemes says the audience reaction at screenings of “Son of Saul” has been rewarding, with the most meaningful response coming from survivors or descendants of survivors. “People came to me after several screenings and said that they were scared to see this film before they saw it, but it was not the film that they had expected. And they thanked me for making it, because it seems this film gives a voice to certain people who experienced it but couldn’t really transmit anything about the visceral part of it.”
But probably the most emotional moment was when he met Dario Gabbai, a Greek Jew and one of the last members of the Sonderkommando, who now lives in Los Angeles and has publicly spoken about what he experienced during the Holocaust.
“He saw the film and was very moved by it,” Nemes recalls, “and we had some sort of connection which reassured me that I did the right thing by making this film. But I know that what I saw in his eyes cannot be communicated.”