“The Grey Zone,” Tim Blake Nelson’s play and 2001 film, takes its color from the ash that floats in the air of the furnace room of Auschwitz in 1944 and settles on the attendants, entering their lungs and their souls as well.
Writer and director Nelson rejects the convention in Holocaust literature that portrays Nazis as totally black and Jews as totally white. The worst of the Nazis’ crimes, he believes, was to force some of their (mostly Jewish) prisoners into complicity.
In “The Grey Zone: Director’s Notes and Screenplay,” Nelson recounts how he researched history, assembled the cast (David Arquette, Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel among others) and reconstructed the crematoria in Bulgaria for the story.
He speaks of the Sonderkommandos, a special squad that occupied a grey zone where the roles of master and slave converged. “These Jewish males,” he writes in his preface, “were told quite simply that they would either help out in the extermination of their fellows or be shot. They cleaned the gas chambers, burned the corpses of those murdered, and ushered fellow Jews to the slaughter.”
We see one prisoner who refuses to load corpses into the oven, and is promptly shot by an SS man. The rest of the squad knows that their reprieve is just temporary. No one could live to bear witness to Auschwitz.
The material for the film is drawn largely from two memoirs: “The Drowned and the Saved,” published by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, and “Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account,” by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli.
The latter, a Hungarian Jew who saved his life by helping Dr. Joseph Mengele with his notorious experiments on twins, is one of the film’s characters loosely based on real people. Nelson’s disdainful comment on Nyiszli is: “He abets the torture of children for research he himself deems ‘bogus.'”
“The Grey Zone” shows us people tolerating the intolerable — living among luxurious but ill-assorted furnishings scavenged from the dead, numbing themselves with liquor and rationalizing their guilt. Although the story is somber and lacks heroism of the Hollywood type, the reader’s interest is held by the efforts of the main characters to find some sort of redemption.
The Sonderkommandos make two such attempts, based on actual events. They try to save a 16-year-old girl found miraculously still alive beneath a pile of gassed corpses. They’ve learned to use such euphemisms as “cargo” for the dead, but this girl is alive! She never speaks, and it’s questionable how much she understands.
Also, in October 1944 the Sonderkommandos rebelled and destroyed a crematorium — the only successful uprising of its type in World War II. They were helped by some of the women prisoners working in a nearby factory, who risked not only their own lives but jeopardized those of all the women in their block. It’s another of the film’s painful moral ambiguities.
“The Grey Zone” contains the director’s preface, notes and screenplay, an introduction by Stanley Kauffman, the longtime New Republic film and theater critic and novelist, and excerpts from the work of Nyiszli and Levi. The film is violent and shocking, but its horrors are accepted matter-of-factly by the workers in their bizarre death-factory. The screenplay, if read along with its notes, is highly effective.
“The Grey Zone: Director’s Notes and Screenplay,” by Tim Blake Nelson (224 pages, Newmarket Press, $18.95).