November 15, 2002 | On a drearily overcast Sunday afternoon 12 years ago, I visited Auschwitz. And for reasons I didn’t entirely understand at first, I felt compelled to touch everything within my reach. I grasped the barbed wire until my palms were nearly bleeding. I held the sleeve of a prisoner’s uniform on display until I had practically memorized the texture of the material. I felt the walls of the gas chambers, I stroked the bricks of the crematoria, I handled the pokers and other devices used to stir the ashes of the dead.
It took me a while before conscious thought caught up to impulsive action. Eventually, however, I understood what I was doing. It was no longer enough to trust the books I had read, or the movies I had seen, or the assumptions I had formed. I was there, and I had to know everything, or at least as much of everything that I could lay my hands on. I had started out motivated by curiosity to see what hell was like. But once I was there, I had to chart its dimensions in the fullest possible detail. To the dead, I owed nothing less.
After seeing The Grey Zone , Tim Blake Nelson’s devastatingly powerful and astonishingly vivid Holocaust drama, I cannot help thinking Nelson, who wrote and directed the film based on his own play, was driven by an even more potent form of the same impulse.
To a degree unmatched even by Steven Spielberg’s awesome Schindler’s List, Grey Zone unflinchingly offers a meticulously detailed re-creation of the Nazi death machine. We see the Jewish prisoners, most of them too confused or terrified to protest, herded into the gas chambers. We hear screams, then moans, then silence. We see members of the Sonderkommando – a squad of fellow prisoners coerced into helping their Nazi captors – loading the dead, naked bodies onto carts. The bodies are brought to crematoria. The ashes are carted away, dumped into pits, then covered. The machine whirls along with plodding efficiency, as ghastly crimes against humanity devolve into a routine of soul-deadening drudgery.
And we think: This is how it must have been.
Nelson filmed Grey Zone on locations in Bulgaria, with mostly American actors speaking pared-to-essentials English dialogue as German, Polish and Hungarian characters. But the artifice does nothing to mitigate the impact or the persuasiveness of the film.
The harrowing realism is sustained in service of a gripping plot inspired by the memoirs of Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish physician selected by Josef Mengele to conduct medical experiments on Auschwitz inmates. Allan Corduner plays Nyiszli with the anguished gravity of a man who knows he sold his soul to the devil, yet feels compelled to continue his living hell of a life.
Very much like members of the Sonderkommando, who delay their own deaths by helping the Nazis annihilate fellow prisoners, he enjoys what passes in this context for luxuries: Better food, wine, cigarettes – and, most important, more time. But Nyiszli is luckier than the others. Each Sonderkommando unit exists for only a few months; eventually, its members are replaced by fresh volunteers.
As a drama, Grey Zone pivots on brutally simple questions: How much will anyone do or endure to remain alive? At what point does the survival instinct transform you into something inhuman? And can you regain even a part of your soul if you do something dangerously, maybe fatally, selfless?
The ensemble cast is uniformly terrific, so it seems slightly unfair to single out individuals. Still, special praise must go to Harvey Keitel, who employs a just-thick-enough German accent to play Muhsfeldt, a Nazi commander, and David Arquette, daringly cast against comic type and thoroughly convincing as a Sonderkommando volunteer who can be every bit as brutal as his captors. Be forewarned: The violence is horrific. But the film is extraordinary.
