SON OF SAUL: The Ethics of Witnessing

• In Event: The Ethics of Witnessing

Abstract

The movie SON OF SAUL, which has received very positive reviews, immerses us in a few days of the life of a member of the SONDERKOMMANDO at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is not an easy film to watch. We are placed inside the world of these men who were made to help shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers and to dispose of their corpses, after first gleaning what was valuable from them (gold fillings, hair from the women).

Saul, like Forest Gump, comes into contact with each of the moments of greatest heroism and significance of the SONDERKOMMANDO (photographing the gas chambers, keeping journals about the work of extermination, and plotting to blow up the crematoria), yet in pursuing his own goals he repeatedly betrays those who seek to bear witness.

The film impels us to care deeply about Saul’s attempt to provide a proper Jewish burial for a boy who may be son. But we take sides without having chosen or decided anything, and without having to acknowledge that we’ve embraced the personal and quixotic quest of someone who at each point places himself above and at times against the heroic and truly significant work of a few members of the SONDERKOMMANDO.

I will begin by exploring this ethical quandary--that our intense confrontation with the horrors of the SONDERKOMMANDO comes about by embracing a quest that involves betraying those who would (and did) communicate these horrors to the world--and then examine the broader questions raised by the film. Primo Levi wrote that the SONDERKOMMANDO represents “an extreme case of collaboration” but also that “conceiving and organizing these squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime.” What is at stake in the recent explosion of interest in the SONDERKOMMANDO, and what does this illuminate about the key issues for Holocaust studies today? How does this film, which takes us inside the gas chambers, help us to reframe the debates about the limits of representation of the Holocaust? And how does SON OF SAUL help us to think anew about collaboration and the “gray zone”?

Author

• Jeffrey Wallen, Hampshire College