The Commandant's Shadow

  • Documentary
  • History
  • War
5/29/2024
103
PG-13

His father murdered more than a million Jews at Auschwitz. She survived the camp against all odds. 80 years later, they come face to face.

While Hans Jurgen Höss enjoyed a happy childhood in the family villa at Auschwitz, Jewish prisoner Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was trying to survive the notorious concentration camp. At the heart of this film is the historic and inspiring moment – eight decades later – when the two come face-to-face. This is the first time the descendant of a major war criminal meets a survivor in such a private and intimate setting, Anita’s London living room. Together with their children, Kai Höss and Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, the four protagonists explore their very different hereditary burdens.

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  • Geronimo1967

    To be honest, I was a little disappointed with this documentary. Occasionally using some truly gruesome archive footage, we are introduced to Hans Höss, the son of the the man who not just commanded the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, but who was largely instrumental in creating the complex in the first place. Loosely using a narration from the autobiography he wrote whilst awaiting trail after the war, we learn a little of the politics that drove this efficient administrator to build a facility that ended up killing ten thousand people a day, whilst seemingly silent at home with his family about just what his day job actually was. Meantime, in London, we meet survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. She's a remarkably stoic charact...

    July 16, 2024

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