Behind the Scenes: The Zone of Interest

The bureaucratic designation “zone of interest” [interessengebiet in German] was used by the Nazi SS to describe the 40 km2 area immediately surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp on the outskirts of Oświęcim, Poland. Used by the late Martin Amis for the title of his 2014 novel and retained by writer-director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) for his long-gestating cinematic adaptation, The Zone of Interest maps the geographical and psychic terrain of the Auschwitz administrators home and work lives with chilling precision.

“We wanted the camera to be like an eye,” explained Lucas Żal, the two time Polish Academy Award nominee (for Ida and Cold War) who shot Glazer’s film.

In the novel, Amis had based the villainous character of Paul Doll — a camp commandant stationed at a fictional version of Auschwitz — on Rudolf Höss, the long-serving Nazi officer widely acknowledged as one of the architects of mass extermination. (He was even credited with pioneering the use of Zyklon B gas.)

Staggeringly, the Höss family home shared its garden wall with the death camp. It was this fact that...