SHOAH ENVY

What with the frenzy of Jew-hatred that has erupted since more than a thousand Israelis were massacred last October - their deaths exciting an obscene blood-lust for more - and The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s stark, icy film showing how it was possible for the uber-Nazi Rudolph Höss to enjoy a happy family life in what was virtually Auschwitz’s back garden - the mass-killing of Jews is once again a subject for coffee-table conversation and occasion for campus exhilaration,

I should add to the above, The Commandant’s Shadow, a very fine documentary which you can see in cinemas right now and which is being talked about as a sort of companion piece to The Zone of Interest, for the reason that its focus, too, is Rudolph Höss and the family he brought up on the lawns of Auschwitz. In fact, though it shares accursed territory with Glazer’s film, The Commandant’s Shadow taps into different feelings. Where The Zone of Interest is conclusively cold, The Commandant’s Shadow is a hot, hurtful film, still unresolved, full of remorse that battles to speak itself and trauma that won’t heal. But both are vital works that should put deniers to shame once and for all.

Deniers!

What, are there still people who deny the Holocaust? Yes, if you allow that denial now takes more subtle, more sinister, and infinitely more wicked forms than in the days when a few nutters crawled over the camps with a tape-measure and a set-square to prove there was only room to gas a couple of prisoners a week. Now we even have envy-based denial, in which the Jews are begrudged the Holocaust, as though being the object of extermination fantasy is a prize to covet . . .