It is a mark of the morally topsy-turvy world of the camp that an autopsy is necessary to determine, not the cause of death, but the cause of survival. As the doctor calmly smothers the boy to death, he orders an autopsy. Early in the film, Saul observes a Nazi doctor standing over the body of a young boy who has inexplicably survived the gas chamber. In preparation for the film, Nemes worked his way through volumes of testimonies, known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, from members of this group.īecause the Sonderkommandos had intermediate status between the Nazis and their fellow Jews, and because their jobs afforded them greater liberty of movement than the other prisoners, the film’s concentration on Saul offers a compressed and highly particularized access to the entire camp. They were, in exchange, better fed and better clothed, but they knew that they would be liquidated in a few months. So these were the people who were at the heart of the extermination machine. These were the prisoners who had to accompany the deported people to the gas chamber and then take out their corpses and burn the corpses in the ovens at the crematorium and then scatter the ashes. The Sonderkommandos were a group of prisoners who were actually separated from the rest of the other prisoners - male prisoners who were forced to assist the Nazis in the extermination process. As Nemes observes in a brief scene analysis of the film’s opening segment, this is the “story of one man,” Saul, who has “become almost like a robot.” Saul is a Sonderkommando, whom Nemes describes thus: Consider, for example, its focus on one man.
The film is simultaneously an immersive, physically taxing experience of life in a camp and a self-conscious reflection on the conditions of, and motives for, Holocaust movies. However, both in its peculiar plot - which focuses exclusively on the story of one man, Saul, brilliantly performed by Géza Röhrig - and in its cinematography - a hand-held, mobile camera that remains persistently and tightly focused on Saul - it marks out its own territory. Son of Saul, the first film (to be released next week on DVD) of László Nemes - he both directed and co-wrote it, and it won both the grand prize at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film - is the latest in a seemingly endless string of Holocaust films.