Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

In the revelatory Holocaust documentary, The Commandant’s Shadow, filmmaker Daniela Volker investigates life after Auschwitz. More specifically, she focuses on Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoss’ son and daughter and grandson, delving into how they’ve come to terms with knowing that their beloved forebear was the mass murderer of more human beings than any other human in history. Hoss’ wife is also questioned about her husband’s ‘work,’ efficiently executing Adolf Hitler’s dictates for the death camp.

Documentarian Daniela Völker’s film follows Hans Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, who was not only the commandant of Auschwitz, but one of the architects of its design, especially as it related to the extermination of prisoners there. A man who had a personal hand in killing over a million Jews, it was his life that was fictionalized in The Zone of Interest. While young son, Hans, played in his back yard, blissfully unaware of what was happening over the wall mere feet away, one prisoner, young cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, was playing for her life. She was part of the orchestra that serenaded victims and Nazi soldiers alike, while selection of who would live and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers was being done.