Son of Saul

Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul is one of the most powerful Holocaust films ever made. He avoids the tendency of cheapening the Holocaust by making it a background for an amenable story, like Life is Beautiful and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Instead he presents the Holocaust as the foreground and threads two thin plot lines into it. 

The film is a very difficult experience because it plunges us into an inferno. Where the German extermination machine is usually depicted as machine-like in its efficiency, here the concentration camp is all noise and fire and chaos. It’s late in the Reich’s life, the war is ending and the Nazis are trying to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible. They reopen the pits and overtax the gas chambers. 

Amid the infernal chaos the film presents two quixotic attempts at rebellion. In the collective effort, a group of inmates conspire to try to blow up the camp and escape. They manage a disruption and a handful of Jews run into the forest and find refuge in a barn. But the Nazis track down and destroy them. This is based on an actual event in Auschwitz (unnamed in the film) in 1944. 

In the personal and fictional revolt, one Sonderkommando, Saul, tries to give a murdered boy a proper Jewish burial. The boy survived a mass gassing. Then Saul watches him killed, then resolves upon the symbolic gesture of a Jewish ceremony amidst the Nazi chaos. He tells some the boy is his son, but he makes no paternal response to him. It’s a strictly symbolic gesture, a reaffirmation of Jewish faith and Jewish service to spite the Nazi operation. (The gesture loses power if Saul thinks the boy is his son.)

As a Sonderkommando Saul is in a compromised position. To eke out a few months of extended life he performs the Nazis’ horrible assignments, herding Jews to their death and plundering their possessions for the Reich. On the sly he manages to make constructive bribes of Nazi guards. Gaza Rohrig”s cleft nose is an emblem of the man divided within himself. So his romantic campaign is important for his conscience.

His search for a cooperative rabbi proves futile. Some refuse to officiate, whether out of lost faith or to survive. One actually escapes Saul’s importuning by running into the lake to drown. Saul hauls him out, but the Nazis shoot the rabbi anyway. When Saul finally finds a collaborator he’s not a rabbi after all; he can’t say Kaddish. 

That prayer becomes an emblem of the overturned order of things. Kaddish is the young man’s prayer for the dead parent. Here it becomes a compromised Jew’s attempt to salve his conscience and serve his God and his faith with a symbolic subversion of the Nazis. In this vision of Hell one man tries to do the right thing — but is thwarted. The attempt is its own reward. In his standing up even the failure is a success.
If Saul failed with his dead boy, the film ends with another boy saved and liberated. A clearly Aryan lad comes upon our escapees in the barn. In Saul’s smile at the boy we read a wider acceptance and feeling of humanity. But will the Jews kill him to prevent his betraying them? The Nazi troops come, silence the boy, kill the Jews, but let the boy run free into the wilds. Dead or alive, the young are our hope for survival, for honour, for amendment of the horrors we leave behind. By not ratting out the Jews the blond boy strikes a note of hope.
     Finally, it's important to consider why this film was made now. As the world faces a renewal in antisemitism -- often in the guise of criticizing Israel's government, i.e.,  for defending herself against annihilation -- and as the deniers of the Holocaust spread their lies and multiply throughout Europe, this film is -- in addition to a vital recreation of the past -- a reflection of the current threat to Jews world wide. Art is always about the here and now, even as it purports to be about the then and there.