Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’ on Max, an Extraordinary Documentary About the Lingering Fallout From Auschwitz

Daniela Volker’s documentary The Commandant’s Shadow ( now streaming on Max ) is a sister film to Jonathan Glazer’s riveting Oscar winner The Zone of Interest . The latter dramatized how Nazi Commandant Rudolf Hoss and his family went about their daily idyll mere meters from the Auschwitz concentration camp; the former gets an audience with Hoss’ son and grandson so they may reflect on the notion of generational guilt. That idea extends to a parallel story of an Auschwitz survivor and her daughter, who wrestle with their own trauma – and then the documentary sees these two stories intersect in a heartbreaking, fascinating and hopefully healing way.

The Gist: That house. The real one. The one Glazer painstakingly recreated in Zone of Interest . Hans Jurgen Hoss, now 87, walks through it, and it stirs memories – good memories. “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz,” he tells his son, Kai Hoss. He and his siblings had many toys, and a lovely garden and pool to play in. A large wall surrounded the yard, and on the other side was the product of his father’s professional diligence and adherence to Nazi ideology: history’s most efficient human-extermination machine. Rudolf Hoss was tasked with designing and executing the plan to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth, and he was responsible for designing the gas chambers and crematoriums where a million people were murdered and turned to ash, at the rate of 10,000 per day. No other human who ever lived has been responsible for more deaths.

We hear excerpts from Rudolf Hoss’ confessional, but coldly clinical autobiography. Kai says there was a copy of the book in the house growing up, but Hans insists he wasn’t aware of it, and has never read it, and was blissfully ignorant of what was going on over the garden wall. He believed his father was a prison warden. He was very young at the time, young enough to not comprehend the context of his life. Kai pushes him: Is Hans perhaps suppressing traumatic memories? I’m not sure we ever get a satisfying answer to that. But Kai – and perhaps Volker – will push Hans to think a little harder and deeper about Rudolf’s deeds. On one side of the wall, the man was a loving father. On the other, he was a monster.

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In London, we meet Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and her daughter Maya. Anita is 98, but doesn’t look or act it. She’s sharp, an ever-present cigarette between her fingers. She survived Auschwitz by playing cello in the camp orchestra, who soundtracked the marches from the trains to the camps to the “showers.” Her musical acumen saved her, and Maya looks across the room at her mother’s cello case and calls it “a monument.” Maya is a career psychotherapist who shares her knowledge about inherited trauma, and paints a broad picture of her complicated relationship with her mother. Maya sits in her childhood bedroom and proclaims it “not a happy place.” Anita is from “the silent generation” who compartmentalized their pain so they could get on with their lives. Anita owns that. She did what she had to do, and understands that it came at a cost, as she admits to finding difficulty in empathizing with others. “I’m the wrong mother to my daughter,” she says, matter-of-factly, as our hearts break.

Hans visits his sister Puppi in the U.S.; she doesn’t want to talk about their father, who she calls “a good man” for being honest about what he’d done. Anita talks about her parents, who were killed by the Nazis; they weren’t practicing Jews, and were devoted to Germany, her father wearing the Iron Cross while fighting in World War I. Kai is a Christian pastor, and we see him sermonizing about the sins of the father, probing the bible for answers to his personal dilemmas. Maya has never lived in Germany, and moves to Berlin because her “bones belong there”; she wants to piece together her family history, and has a heavy emotional moment while visiting a memorial for her grandparents. Eventually, Maya comes into contact with Kai and Hans, and meets them at Auschwitz, and then everyone comes together in Anita’s home for tea and a slice of pie.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Commandant’s Shadow hits as hard as The Zone of Interest , Son of Saul and Schindler’s List .

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Performance Worth Watching: All involved parties are asking and/or facing some intense, difficult questions about who they were, who they are, and who they will be. There’s true bravery in that.

Memorable Dialogue: Anita comments on the modern state of antisemitism: “This is going to the next stage. Not what we’ve done, but what we’re doing now . That is important.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Volker seems driven by a quiet urgency to find people like Anita and Hans and break through their silent-generation tendencies so we can listen to them as they share the messy conflicts inside their heads. That she found subjects willing to expose themselves – not just to audiences, but to themselves to a degree – feels like a small miracle. That Anita survived to live a long life is a bigger one. That Anita is forced to talk about antisemitism’s modern-day resurgence makes miracles feel impossible.

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Which is to say The Commandant’s Shadow functions with undeniable emotional and intellectual power. Volker sometimes interviews her subjects one-to-one, but mostly she embeds herself into their lives so we can “overhear” conversations between Anita and Maya, Hans and Kai, Hans and Puppi. The method is warm, natural and unforced, a fascinating yin-and-yang contrast to Glazer’s chilly, stylized, but similarly observational approach to The Zone of Interest . It’s heavy, absorbing and deeply involving.

Initially, Volker plumbs the psychology of Anita and Hans, then their adult children, before shifting to the physical and emotional journey of Maya’s relocation and the eventual trip to the eerie, empty, fog-cloaked concentration camp, where they stand silently in the gas chamber, and Hans contemplates the gallows where his father was hanged. The climactic meeting of the four principals is engineered, but poignant, albeit not in the wringingly tearful manner you might expect – Anita doesn’t let that happen, not out of any contrivance necessarily, but because it’s who she is, who she’s become over the decades. The end point of this story isn’t resolution necessarily – that might be impossible – but a symbolic convergence: people who are far more than simple ideological bundles, coming together on a fundamentally human level.

Our Call: The Commandant’s Shadow is an extraordinary documentary. Difficult to watch, but extraordinary. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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