Dachau, The Zone of Interest, and Two Schindlers

In the late 80’s, I went on a school trip to Munich. I was working at Daniel Stewart’s and Melville College then, and the trip was with the sister school, The Mary Erskine School (please never neglect the ‘The’).

I was with three excellent colleagues, including my best friend, Dr Scott. The trip was led by Sally, who taught German and the girls were great. For me, who had at that time only taught boys, they were…different. Each of us, at Sally’s request, had to lead on one day, and I elected to lead the trip to Dachau.

Though I briefly taught History, I am no historian, and the courses I taught, as I recall, stopped at the Suffragettes. Like so many people in these pre-internet days, my understanding of Nazism and specifically of the Holocaust, was framed from bits and pieces. My parents, of course, had lived through the war. My father avoided being called up both because he worked in a reserved profession and because he had a perforated eardrum; my mother, seven years younger, was only 13 when the war finished, but she had a Jewish penfriend, Lilian, in the USA who showed her great kindness, including sending her foods she had never seen before; for this reason, she was staunchly pro-Jewish throughout her life, even leaving money in her will to Jewish causes. So, of course, my parents hated the Germans, even though my father found it very difficult, I think to hate anybody. As I grew older, I found this hard, because I have always really liked any German I have met.

I do not remember what my worksheet on Dachau asked about, for a worksheet there would have been. Dr Scott, being both an academic historian and a great teacher, and always very kind to me, almost certainly helped. But I do remember two things very clearly, even though it will be nearly forty years ago. 

The first was the little film that we watched on arrival, that staple of the historical visit, that balm of the school trip. Ten minutes to get yourself together (even nip out for a fag, in these days) while the young people are told (in this country, often by Gordon Jackson) about Culloden or Stirling Bridge or Stonehenge. But the Dachau film was shocking, and its horror was intensified for me by the group of nuns seated directly in front of me, who sobbed and held each other. And I suppose then I realised that this was not really a school trip but an exposure to evil, an evil that was perpetrated when my own parents were young, a systematic wickedness that stopped only twelve years before I was born.

Yet more telling, though, was another school trip visiting that day: young Germans. Sally pointed out the old man talking to his group of teenagers, their teacher on their trip. She was whispering a translation of what he was saying to me when, quite suddenly, he burst into tears; apparently the Nazi era had only just formed part of the curriculum in German schools, and here he was, this old chap, trying to teach something which was, quite clearly, lodged deep inside him. What would he have been saying to these boys and girls, his grandchildren’s age? How could he possibly have explained it?

A few years later, in 1993, I went to see ‘Schindler’s List’ with my friend Jane at Edinburgh’s old neighbourhood cinema, the Dominion. I was late and she was not well pleased. In these days of course, you queued and we ended up at the back. We got in, but were separated. I was at the end of a row, sitting next to a very large man, who ate – silently but continuously – throughout the film. You may remember that the film was very long, and, as was not uncommon, it had an interval, which occurred just after the horrible, searing scene, in which the ghetto in Cracow was ‘liquidated’. Well, alone really at the end of the row, I was sobbing, and did not really have the capacity to quieten myself when the lights came up for the break. The plump man in the next seat regarded me concernedly. 

‘Are you ok?’ he said. I think he too was on his own and, to all intents and purposes, so was I.

‘Yes’ I said, ‘it’s just so awful’. Of course I was thinking about the children I taught.

‘Yes,’ he said reflectively. ‘Would you like some chocolate?’

Last month I saw ‘The Zone of Interest’, a very different film, which also left me in an emotional state: chilled, confused and fraught: I had not read Amis’s novel on which it is based, so had no warning.  It was a film unlike any other I have seen, more like a long, curated art installation than a conventional movie. Its emphasis on domestic details, some of them mundane and some of them ghastly was underscored by its soundscape. It has lived on in my memory and, in its way, made me think more about the Holocaust than Spielberg’s film, no matter how much the latter got to me.

However, I suppose it was seeing ‘The Zone of Interest’ that led me to read ‘Schindler’s Ark’, Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book, on which ‘Schindler’s List’ was based. I have two things to say about this quite brilliant book. 

Those of you of a certain age may remember that Keneally’s book won the Booker Prize – which is awarded to a novel – and you also may remember the outcry from some critics and novelists who felt that, no matter how great the book was, it wasn’t a novel. I think they were right. While Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ is, I think, one of the greatest books ever written, I find the idea of the ‘non-fiction novel’ simply a contradiction. ‘Schindler’s Ark’ is a biographical study of Oskar Schindler, brilliantly written, very moving and horrifying, this latter quality enhanced by Keneally’s willingness to let terrible things speak for themselves. An interesting comparison is with J G Ballard’s ‘Empire of the Sun’, which is faithfully based on the actual experiences of the author and shares with Keneally’s a similar flat descriptive narrative style, but the latter, with its invented characters and point of view falls, I believe, as a novel.

The other thing about Keneally’s great book, and its depiction of its very human, flawed hero is that this flatness of style, its refusal to embroider its descriptions of evils that live in the memories of the survivors it depicts makes it in tone it is much more like ‘The Zone of Interest’ than ‘Schindler’s List’. Anyway, Dachau, the story of Schindler, these two films. I’m nowhere nearer understanding how these things happened, and I don’t believe I ever will.