I recently re-watched Jonathan Glazer’s movie, Zone of Interest, with a group of friends. As I wrote in an earlier essay, not much happens in the film and of course, we know how it turns out: a lot of Jews die in great numbers due to the relentless efficiency of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss. The movie ignores the killing factory inside the wall surrounding the camp and focuses instead on what happens just outside the wall in Höss’s home. We see Hoss’s career aspirations, the conflict with his wife over whether he will be re-assigned to another position and will have to move, the visit of Höss’s mother-in-law, the technical challenges of murdering people quickly in great numbers, various outings of Höss with his children.

Maybe ten seconds of the film seem to occur in the camp. It is hard to say. But there is a scene where the camera is aimed upward at Höss’s face, ringed in smoke and the cries of the victims are louder than at other times in the film. Despite the focus on life outside of the walls of Auschwitz, the suffering of the victims is ever-present due to the soundtrack which is best heard on your own rather than reading about it. Suffice it to say that while watching the movie we see the daily life—the humanity—of the perpetrators of perhaps the worst inhumanity occurring only a few feet away.

There are no real plot twists, but there is quite a bit of subtle commentary that is an undercurrent of the film; I was surprised at how much I noticed on a second viewing. But that is not my focus here. I want to talk about what we might learn from this juxtaposition of the mundane—as if we were watching a documentary—with the utmost savagery that happens simultaneously.

How should we think about Rudolf Höss and other men like him who did what they did as part of the Nazi killing machine? How should we think about Höss’s wife who the film portrays as a social climber and a lover of life’s comforts—her children, her flowers, and the clothes she is able to take from the victims of Auschwitz.

And watching the movie in 2024, how should we think about the perpetrators of October 7th 2023 who raped, murdered, and kidnapped, often with delight in their acts and in the sharing of those acts with their families back in Gaza and with the world?

And it is not just the cruelty that offends us. This was not cruelty in the service of a larger cause. There was an inherent goal of both the Nazis and the perpetrators of October 7th to kill Jews just for the sake of killing Jews. Fellow human beings were brutalized simply because of an accident of birth. This is particularly painful to consider in the context of October 7th—many of the victims were people who chose to live near Gaza in order to build bridges between the Jewish people of Israel and the Arab population of Gaza.

On the surface, there is a contrast between the Nazis and those who committed the crimes of October 7th. At least in the case of this movie version of Höss’s family life, Höss and his family embody Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil. Höss, like Eichmann, seems to be merely doing a job, and he has adopted the motto that any job worth doing is worth doing well. And he does it well. Only at the end of the film is there a hint that he may have some misgivings about what he has done. Perhaps this is a reference to what Höss in real life wrote just before his execution by hanging:

My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.

One cannot help but notice that there is no mention of Jews in this reflection.

It is tempting to call Höss and his fellow Nazis, monsters. Yet the film is one long lesson in Höss’s non-monstrous humanity. He cares about his children, he laughs with his wife before going to bed, he picnics with his family, he calls his wife late at night to share a career success. One might reasonably conclude that the lesson of the film is that human beings can do monstrous things and perhaps, that is the best way to think of such seemingly complicated people. Hitler, after all, loved his dog.

Höss, in the film, finds time to read them bedtime stories. He is clearly not a monster, but a terribly flawed human being. Are his deeds inside the wall enough to make him a monster? One must also wonder, as someone watching the film with me the other night asked, does his kindness outside the wall mitigate any of his transgressions on the other side? Or do the moments of human kindness by Höss make his transgressions as mastermind of a murder machine even more unforgivable?

One of the group watching the other night emphasized how important it is to avoid calling the Nazis monsters or animals, as something inhuman. Using terms like monsters or animals, in some sense lets the perpetrators of evil off the hook. After all, we do not condemn the lion that chases down an antelope, or the neighbor’s cat that plays with the rat in its teeth before killing and eating it. To call the Nazis or those accountable for October 7th, monsters, is to imply they were simply fulfilling their destiny. Accusing them of inhumanity excuses their deeds.

At the same time, if we are not careful, by emphasizing the human-ness of a Rudolf Höss, we imply that all of us are capable of being inhumane, that there is nothing unique or special to be noticed. But is the only lesson of Nazi Germany or of October 7th that human beings who see others as less than human can be remarkably cruel? Is the Jew-hatred involved in both crimes just incidental? As a Jew, I find that hard to accept. And is it really true that all of us are capable of unimaginable cruelty under the right circumstances? I like to think otherwise while understanding that thinking otherwise may be merely wishful thinking.

A film like Zone of Interest forces us to say that Höss and others like him were merely human beings who did monstrous things. I do not know what happened to Höss’s children, but certainly the German people of today are not monsters. Many had parents who did monstrous things. But they did not spawn successive generations of monsters. Calling the Nazis monsters seems too facile.

Part of me also wants to avoid the term monsters lest I dehumanize not just the perpetrators but their neighbors. Surely some everyday Germans, maybe many, were happy with the Final Solution. Surely some everyday Gazans, maybe many, rejoiced in the worst acts of October 7th. But not all. I feel no need to demonize an entire people, as mine have been. Demonizing the worst of a people may tempt us to lump others in with them. It also can excuse any response, for after all, we are dealing with monsters. Surely this is what made the fire bombing of Dresden and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki permissible to people who saw themselves as just warriors in a just cause. All the Israelis I know do not wish Gazan civilians to die. Many if not most of those civilians are not monsters; that monsters may live among them, if you choose to use that term, does not justify responding to October 7th without restraint.

This conclusion is easy to write. It is not so easy to hold to in practice. If the perpetrators of October 7th are not described as monsters or animals (and I have tried in all of my writing on this topic to avoid such phrases), what words are left to capture the cruelty of October 7th and the delight the perpetrators felt in that cruelty? What words do we have for someone who kills a grandmother and broadcasts the murder to her grandchildren using her phone? What words do we have for someone who is close enough to his parents to brag to them that he has killed many Jews seeking their praise? What words do we have for the unspeakable sexual violence and grotesque mutilation that was done to the vulnerable because it could be? Calling people who do such things “flawed” or “complicated,” seems like a moral abdication.

Perhaps it is enough to say that words fail us in the face of the cruelty that people are capable of inflicting on others. And that more important than the words that we use to describe such acts are our actions in response to such acts and the demand for accountability. And to do everything in our power to prevent such monstrosities from happening again.

There is another perspective, though, that deserves hearing. It is easy to stereotype Höss as the banality of evil and to see his career aspirations as a particular form of extreme compartmentalization, a compartmentalization we might describe as a form of deep human failure, a failure that clinical terms like psychosis merely cover-up and excuse, akin to a label like “monster.” Yes, there is a cold, empathy-less detachment to Höss’s actions that seem to contrast with the despicable exuberance of October 7th.

But I think this stereotype, while an interesting aspect of human cruelty—the ability to act unthinkingly or to excuse one’s worst failings—ignores the tragic breadth of what it took to sustain the Nazi killing machine. Yes, there were what looks like the bureaucratic banality of evil in viewing a Höss or an Eichmann. But a different perspective comes from Vasily Grossman, the Russian novelist and writer of the mid-20th century.

Grossman entered Treblinka shortly after its liberation. Read Grossman’s essay, “The Hell of Treblinka.” You can find it in the collection of Grossman’s shorter writings, The Road. Written in 1944 just as Grossman entered the camp just after its liberation, The Hell of Treblinka is the opposite of the Zone of Interest. Instead of focusing on the ability of humans to lead normal lives while doing abnormal things, Grossman reminds us of just how abnormal, just how cruel, just how monstrous, the Nazis could be. Grossman writes of a member of the SS at Treblinka, a man named Sepp who is mentioned frequently by those who survived:

This creature specialized in the killing of children. Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel, and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.

When I first heard about this creature—supposedly human, supposedly born of a woman—I could not believe the unthinkable things I was told. But when I heard these stories repeated by eyewitnesses, when I realized that these witnesses saw them as mere details, entirely in keeping with everything else about the hellish regime of Treblinka, then I came to believe that what I had heard was true.

Grossman then observes:

What should appall us is not that nature gives birth to such monsters—there are, after all, any numbers of monsters in the physical world. There are Cyclops, and creatures with two heads, and there are corresponding psychic monstrosities and perversions. What is appalling is that creatures which should have been isolated and studied as psychiatric phenomena were allowed to live active lives, to be active citizens of a particular State.

Grossman goes on to say that this is precisely what we should study. Not how it is that there are seemingly normal men who do monstrous things, but that killing factories set up through the power of the state, empower psychopaths and monsters.

Grossman describes the inhumanity of the criminals working in those factories and contrasts them with the courage and love that the victims expressed in their dying moments. The mother comforting her son. A son comforting a sobbing mother. Grossman’s honors them for dying as human beings, the greatest accolade he has to bestow. And if they did indeed die somehow with any of their humanity intact, surely those who tormented them are not human beings. The tormentors cannot claim that name. Grossman calls them creatures, animals, beasts. Human being is reserved for those who in the face of inhuman cruelty, kept some dim spark of their humanity alive.

While chronicling via eyewitnesses the worst depravities that human beings can do to one another (calling them “amusements” with the most bitter of sarcasm), Grossman captures the same banality of evil that Glazer portrays but ultimately avoids any temptation to humanize the perpetrators:

After they had finished their work for the day, and after amusements such as those described above, they would sleep the sleep of the just, not disturbed by dreams or nightmares. They were not tormented by conscience, if only because not one of them possessed a conscience. They did gymnastics, drank milk every morning, and generally took good care of their health. They showed no less concern with regard to their living conditions and personal comforts, surrounding their living quarters with tidy gardens, sumptuous flower beds, and summerhouses. Several times a year, they went on leave to Germany, since their bosses determined work in this “factory” to be detrimental to health and were determined to look after their workers. Back at home they walked about with their heads held high. If they said nothing about their work, this was not because they were ashamed of it but simply because, well disciplined as they were, they did not dare to violate their pledge of silence. And when, in the evening, they went arm in arm with their wives to the cinema and burst into loud laughter, stamping their hobnailed boots on the floor, it would have been hard to tell them apart from the most ordinary man in the street. Nevertheless, they were beasts—vile beasts, SS beasts.

There is a darkness in the heart of most human beings. Most of us are blessed to live in places where the State does not harness that darkness in the name of power. We understand that in thugocracies like Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, or Hamas’s Gaza, the worst depravities are encouraged and honored. The most monstrous rise to the top. Still, people choose. Some manage to stand tall in the face of injustice and say no. Maybe only a few. Grossman reminds us that sometimes judgment and understanding work against one another rather than hand in hand. Remembering the humanity of the Nazis may help us understand something of the complexity of the human heart in the darkest of systems and the cruelest of times, but understanding, if we are not careful, can cause us to withhold judgment when the moral clarity of judgment is precisely what is needed.