Third, members of the Sonderkommando weren’t collaborators they acted to save their lives, they were subjected to the same threats of murder as other Jewish inmates, and they made use of their position and their slender grasp on survival in order to bear witness to (and possibly to resist) the German machine of murder.
The first is the overturning of the demeaning cliché that Jews went to their death passively, “like sheep.” (“Son of Saul” evokes the monstrous deception to which the deportees were subjected.) The second takes that notion further: some Jews actively and violently resisted the Nazi death regime.
SON OF SAUL BIJOU SAN ANTONIO MOVIE
He’s not really a character-he’s a blank-but, in the few days of action that the movie presents, he’s the union of two (or, rather, three) crucial ideas that arise from Lanzmann’s epochal film. Saul becomes an accidental rebel (and, as it turns out, a rather incompetent and unreliable one), but that’s beside the point. Though Saul never makes his reasoning clear (once, he explains, “I have to eat”), he seems to join the uprising neither from commitment nor to save himself but to win his colleagues’ aid in his efforts to bury his son, and to gain the measure of mobility, as a part of their plot, that will help him to do so.
Moreover, for that burial he needs a rabbi, and, making use of his position as a Sonderkommando (which allows him to move not quite freely but at least widely throughout the concentration camp), Saul obsessively searches among Jewish deportees to find one.īut, early in his quest, he happens upon other Sonderkommando members who are organizing an armed uprising to destroy the gas chambers, and they recruit him to that cause.
What Saul actually wants is something more drastic and seemingly impossible: he wants to take the body and give it a proper burial. While emptying the gas chamber of bodies, Saul sees a boy who is still breathing the boy dies moments thereafter, but his body is taken by a camp doctor for autopsy-and Saul, visiting the doctor (who turns out also to be a prisoner), tells him that the boy is his son and that he wants to spend a few minutes with the body. Then the Sonderkommando collects their valuables for the Germans, discards the clothing, and removes the corpses (called “pieces” by the Germans) from the gas chambers. At the start of the film, Saul, with this group, ushers Jews from the dressing (or, rather, undressing) rooms where they leave their clothing and valuables, into what are called showers and are actually gas chambers. In the camp-which is both a concentration camp for slave labor and an extermination camp-Saul is a member of a Sonderkommando, a squad of Jews ordered by the German overlords to facilitate the killing of other Jews. It was when Hungarian Jews arrived that the pace of murder in Auschwitz greatly accelerated-and when the Soviet Army was rumored to be approaching. Its protagonist is Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig), a Jew who has been deported from his native Hungary, from which the mass deportation of Jews only occurred in 1944. “Son of Saul” takes place almost entirely in Auschwitz-Birkenau, late in the Second World War-and that timing matters. To the extent that it’s an immediate cinematic experience, it’s a daring but tasteless jumble of stylistic flourishes and dramatic intentions.
To the extent that it’s a gloss on ideas from Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” and his later films, László Nemes’s first feature, “Son of Saul” (which opened December 25th), is a revealing alignment of symbolic gestures.
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