A new documentary, “The Commandant’s Shadow,” chronicles the lives of two elderly people who, as children, lived on opposite sides of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp: 98-year old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a Jewish cellist who was ordered to play music to pacify the arrivals of Jews at Auschwitz, and 87-year old Hans Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the notorious Commandant of Auschwitz.
Spoiler: the two meet on camera. It’s a story that many people will find remarkable — watching the grandchildren of Nazis grapple with their family history. The burdens they carry in action will put viewers through a range of emotions. It’s part of the real story behind the 2023 Academy Award-nominated film “The Zone of Interest.”
The majority of the documentary is a buildup before that meeting. Half of the film is Hans’ son Kai (Rudolf’s grandson) getting his father to talk (in German) about how he has spent his life wrestling with the burden of his father’s atrocities: Rudolf presided over the murder of over a million Jews.
The other half of the documentary follows Anita and her daughter, Maya, an English-born psychologist now based in Germany. Anita was 19 years old when her talent as a cellist saved her life — she was selected to play in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. Anita would also survive Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, Anita moved to England and co-founded the English Chamber Orchestra. In 2000, she authored the memoir “Inherit the Truth: A Memoir of Survival and the Holocaust.”
The documentary also highlights Maya’s relationship with her mother. Since she was young, Maya endured separation anxiety, self-harming, obesity and alcohol and drug addiction. At one point, she was homeless in Jamaica. But with the support of her family, Maya was able to recover and eventually became a psychotherapist. When she moved to Germany in 2020, a place her mother never set foot in since the Holocaust — it was a watershed moment in Maya’s life.
“The Commandant’s Shadow” began as Maya’s idea following the success of her first book, “Briefe nach Breslau” (“Letter to Breslau,”) which explores intergenerational trauma from her grandparents who died in the Holocaust to her own generation. Anita has forbidden Maya from publishing the book in English until after she passes. As a psychoanalytic psychologist and educator, Maya studies and treats patients experiencing trauma and the complex web that has effects across generations.
“I was and still am very interested in working with the children of perpetrators, I think their suffering is irreconcilable,” Maya told The Journal. “There’s this ‘hierarchy of suffering’ where you can’t compare, but the self-punishment among descendants of perpetrators is so profound that it’s almost impossible to find peace.”
For Hans’ meeting with Anita in England, it would be Hans’ first time having a meeting with a concentration camp survivor. Hans and Kai arrive with a Breslau kugel as a gift. Maya talks about her father and tells Hans “You weren’t asked whose son you want to be.” Kai says unequivocally he hates his grandfather Rudolf. For Hans’ answer to the hate question, you’ll have to watch the documentary, but he does describe the thought as ‘unbearable.”
Director Daniela Völker does a phenomenal job of documenting so many emotional moments, interspersed with black and white footage from the days when Hans and Anita were mere acres from each other at Auschwitz.
There’ s a defiant moment during an interview with Hans’ sister, Brigitte, prior to Hans and Anita’s meeting. Brigitte, living in Virginia, expressed her own troubled perspectives on her father Rudolf’s atrocities.
“Sometimes I even thought, ‘why do I have to suffer, like physically, so bad?’” Brigitte said in the documentary. “And I even thought if this G-d will be angry with me because my dad did things? But I said I will never be angry with my dad. He must’ve been a very strong person to live like this and do what he had to do.”
Director Völker responded to Brigitte, “What he had to do was to basically kill more than a million people — ” before Brigitte interrupted her question with a terse “I don’t think that way.” Brigitte continued, “look at all the people they say died in the camps, but all the survivors, why didn’t they die? They’re still living and they get money now from Germany, from the Jewish people and, so whatever you want to believe, you do.”
Völker pressed Brigitte further: “Do you think you’re in denial?” Brigitte retorted to Völker, “It was the way it was. It was the Third Reich, a long time ago. It’s history, what can I do? What can I say?”
The on-camera meeting between Anita and Hans would be their only contact.
“Sadly, I hoped, I hoped the invitation would be reciprocated, but that’s not how it has panned out, so it is what it is,” Maya said. “And I didn’t really have any expectations from Hans, but it hasn’t been in a relational sense. It has not been a beginning, but what it was in time, so be it.”
Höss was captured in 1946 and tried for murder. He was sentenced to death by hanging, which was carried out on the grounds of the former Auschwitz death camp. Hans still lives in Germany. Brigitte died in October 2023. Anita will turn 99 years old in a few weeks. She still lives on her own in England and smokes about 40 cigarettes a day.
“We can’t forgive what has happened, but the important thing is that we talk to each other and understand each other.” -Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
“We can’t forgive what has happened,” Anita said in the documentary. “But the important thing is that we talk to each other and understand each other,”
The Journal asked Maya a few more questions about the “The Commandant’s Shadow.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JEWISH JOURNAL: What lessons have you learned from working with descendants of Nazis?
MAYA LASKER WALLFISCH: The key thing is that their suffering is worse because there is no peace to find. And I’m not suggesting there’s peace to find for the descendants of survivors. If there is, I haven’t quite found it yet, I think the self-punishment is so profound and so distorted that it is almost impossible to have a space where what we did do was possible. And of course, every human being is different. This is just the experience, how it was with these particular people. I have worked quite a lot with another less prolific famous child of a Nazi. It’s a kind of infamy in a way. What worries me actually about the film, if anything, is that I really hope it doesn’t somehow sensationalize something that really is still not understood very well at all.
JJ: What do you say to people who are struggling to share the story of their parents’ atrocities out there?
MLW: Do it. It doesn’t need to be for a wider audience, but bottling it up is never a good thing. Talk about it in whatever context is comfortable. It’s better out than in.
JJ: As a mental health professional, how do you explain the “hierarchy of suffering” and “inherited trauma” to people?
MLW: Well, I think context is everything. Context is everything. And when the whole sort of discovery of epigenetics and the advances of neuroscience and new ways of understanding, it just gave me such a relief. Talking about the way in which to begin to educate people is by talking about it in a relatable way. This hierarchy of suffering is a concept that I began to think about and write about many, many years ago when I realized that there was no space for my suffering, because how can you compare? Well, you can’t compare. I was brought up with messages like, ‘you are not going to the gas chamber, you’re not starving, you’re hungry? What are you talking about? You’ve had a piece of bread. What’s your problem?’ And so there’s a complete distortion of what is suffering, what is suffering, and again, to think about this whole concept of the hierarchy of it, which is such an interesting thing in survivors as well, between survivors, Kindertransport, this one, the whole thing, and the competitiveness of suffering. It’s a really, really challenging thing. But I think it is something that once, it’s like any taboo: talk about it and people are relieved.
The Commandant’s Shadow will be screened at multiple theaters in Los Angeles May 29-30. For tickets or more information, go to https://www.fathomevents.com/events/the-commandants-shadow/
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