The question at the heart of the film The Zone of Interest is also at the heart of evangelism.
It’s a holocaust movie that begins with a picnic. In the Oscar winner, The Zone of Interest, we only hear the horrors of Auschwitz; what we see is the normality of family life. The family in question is that of the Camp Commandant, Rudolph Höss. They live in the ‘manse’, so to speak, only yards outside the gates of the concentration camp. In the bedroom, Rudolph’s wife, Hedwig, tries on fur coats that belonged to the victims. In the dining room, crematorium design is discussed as a triumph of engineering. Outside, the children play while ash clouds blow over from the chimney stacks beyond the garden wall.
That wall is significant. It separates the horrific from the everyday. It signifies the ways in which we try to block out an evil that is ‘out there’. But it turns out that the evil is ‘in here’ – with us. We are the problem, and there is not a wall on earth that can keep it out.
