The Zone of Interest
A24
The online furor over the comments made by director Jonathan Glazer in his Oscar acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest — where the British director commented on the ongoing war in Gaza — has overshadowed Glazer’s closing statements, in which he dedicated his Academy Award to Alexandria Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, a woman who fought the Nazis as a member of the Polish resistance.
Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk was the inspiration for the night-vision scenes in Zone which show a young girl secretly leaving food for prisoners in Auschwitz. Glazer, who met Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk before her death in 2016, carefully modeled the film’s character on her, going as far as to use her actual bicycle and dress for the actress on screen. Commenting on her scenes, which were shot using a night vision camera, Glazer said, “[She] glows in the film as she did in life. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance.”
Aleksandra is “the only light” in the film, Glazer said on the eve of Zone‘s U.S. release in mid-December, drawing a contrast to the “dehumanization” represented by the film’s central characters, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedl) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller).
The story of Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk’s real-life heroism can be read in her diaries and letters, which have been carefully preserved by the Polish association Stowarzyszenia Auschwitz Memento.
“As it was not possible to bring food or medicine [into the camp] during the day, we went at night,” reads one diary entry, explaining Aleksandra’s nighttime excursions to smuggle food into Auschwitz.
Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk was born in July 1927 in Brzeszcze, a town less than six miles from the eventual site of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau compound. Her father was a surveyor at a local mine. Her mother helped found the town’s hospital. Resistance ran in the family, Aleksandra’s great-grandfather had fought [unsuccessfully] in the January 1863 uprising against Russian czarist occupiers.
“He was a Polish patriot and tried to educate his children in this spirit,” Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk wrote in her diary.
In April 1940, the German army occupying the city looted the mine where Aleksandra’s father worked, capturing him along with other Polish officials. They were held by the Gestapo for two weeks before being transferred to Dachau concentration camp.
“The conditions were terrible. The prisoners were forced into heavy manual labor and fed one slice of bread a day with a thin broth made of beet leaves and buckwheat,” she recounts. “Their hunger was so great that they gnawed the bark off trees. One day they found a mouse in the soup pot and the prisoners immediately went for it.”
Eventually, her father was released. “When I saw him I fainted for the first time in my life,” she recalls. “He looked like a ghost. Just skin and bones. He had entered the camp weighing 89 kg (197 lbs), and when he came back he weighed only 32 kg (70 lbs).”
By 1941, the Nazis had begun construction of the Auschwitz complex. There were more than 40 camps, including the death camp, Auschwitz II, next to which the Höss family lived, as depicted in The Zone of Interest, which is set in 1943.
The building of the concentration camp complex involved the massive displacement of the local Polish population. Between 1940 and 1941, the Germans displaced about 17,000 Poles and Jews from Oświęcim (the Polish name for the town of Auschwitz) and nearby villages. The entire Jewish population of Oświęcim — a total of about 7,000 — was deported to ghettos. Eight Polish villages were destroyed and more than a hundred buildings located in the town of Oświęcim were demolished.
“We were all eager to see what color the plaque on our house would be. Red meant displacement, green meant freedom to stay,” writes Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk. “It was terrible. You were allowed a few pounds of things to carry on your back and that was it. The rest had to be left behind. So we took what we could.”
Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk joined the Polish resistance movement Związek Walki Zbrojnej while still a teenager, one of the more than 1,200 Poles in the area surrounding Auschwitz. Every one of them were risking their lives. If caught, they knew they would be imprisoned and sent to the camps, where death was almost certain.
But the Nazi guards did not pay as much attention to young Polish girls going in and out of the camps, allowing Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, who chose the code name “Olena,” and her sister to act as liaisons between the prisoners and the outside world. Under the guise of working in the mine, they smuggled in food, medicine and warm winter clothes and smuggled out messages. She worked mainly at night, hiding supplies inside the camps where prisoners could find them. The scenes in The Zone of Interest, showing her hiding apples in the mud, come from her first-person accounts.
She witnessed horrific scenes that marked her for life. “We did not have a childhood,” she wrote. “We began life already as adults.”
After the war, Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk remained in the same town. She graduated from a technical institute but could not continue her studies because the communist authorities did not approve of her activities in World War II. Resistance to authority was not in favor.
Glazer met Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk in the early stages of planning the film, when she was 90 years old. She told him the stories of riding her bicycle to the camp to smuggle in apples, how she found the mysterious musical score, composed by an Auschwitz prisoner named Joseph Wulf, who survived the war. In the film, we see the young girl playing the music on her piano at home. Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk died in 2016, a few weeks after meeting Glazer.
For the director, Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk’s actions are an answer to the question he posed to the Oscar audience: “How do we resist?”
“That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the only point of light,” the director said, in an interview with The Guardian. “I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good.”