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Canberra Today 13°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Son Of Saul’ (M, plus a warning – contains many passages deserving MA or even R) ***

son of saul movieON 16 June 1944, eye-witnesses Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler reported to Allied leaders the gassing procedures at Auschwitz. Later, Arnost Rosin and Czeslaw Mordowicz described the arrival and killing there of Hungarian Jews.

These reports led Winston Churchill to write to an associate: “There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”

On 2 November that year, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler issued an order forbidding “any further annihilation of Jews”. Auschwitz was itself obliterated, except one crematorium to burn bodies that died naturally and for gassing about 200 members of the remaining sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners forced to operate the equipment until they too, no longer able to work, would be killed.

Forgive me for spoiling your reading with this terrible information, but it may help to explain Hungarian writer/director Laszlo Nemes’ film in which Geza Rohrig plays Saul, a sonderkommando who has seen his son gassed and spends the rest of the day trying to find a rabbi to say kaddish so that Saul may at least bury the boy properly.

It’s a hell of a film, terrifying in its verity, cinematically commanding using a hand-held camera to record long, violently-moving takes showing how the system worked.

In a commendable act, Palace Cinemas are screening “Son Of Saul” across Australia. It won the Cannes Film Festival jury prize. I can imagine only one reason for making it: Lest we forget.

At Palace Electric

 

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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