What sound does a crematorium make?
Above: An image from the movie “The Zone of Interest”
15 December 2023 (Berlin, Germany) — It is difficult to find the words that capture the experience of visiting such a place as Auschwitz. It is humanity’s most depraved and shameful exhibit towards the capacity of evil to take shape and form. There is a feeling in the air – a malevolence and smoldering evil – that fills the spaces where the giant crematorium and gas chambers once stood at Birkenau.
It is a chilling place. Auschwitz was a sprawling and interconnected series of slave labor camps that were built up around the main camp, which is remembered today as Auschwitz 1. This is where the only surviving gas chamber remains at the death camp, as well as scores of barracks, cells and torture chambers where Jews, political prisoners, gays, and other enemies of the state were held, tortured and enslaved.
But next to the exterior brick wall, topped with barbed wire that marked the boundaries of the camp, stands a large villa, a house. I remembered being shocked by the incongruence of a family home so close to the camp and was astounded that it remained.
This was the moment I first heard the story of the people who once lived in the house, and the woman who called the place a “paradise.” Her name was Hedwig Höss. She raised five children there with her husband, the commandant of Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss was executed at Auschwitz in 1947 for crimes against humanity. Höss was responsible for more than one million murders.
Over the years, I have often thought about that house and the people who lived there. When I first heard that a movie would be made about the Höss family and their paradise bordering the wall that marked the boundary of Auschwitz, I resolved to see it as soon as it was released. The movie is called “The Zone of Interest,” and is directed by Jonathan Glazer. When the audience I watched it with reached the end of the film, we sat in stunned silence.
And it was somewhat appropriate I should watch it in Berlin. I have spent the weekend in the research library of the “Topography of Terror” – an outdoor and indoor history museum in Berlin, located on the remains of Nazi regime’s security entities: the Sicherheitspolizei, the Einsatzgruppen and the Gestapo.
I have never seen any movie like it, ever. There are no words. Simply, “The Zone of Interest” is the greatest meditation ever made on film about the banality of evil and the capacity of human beings to be indifferent towards cruelty that beggars imagination.
And I had a personal interest. I know the sound designer on the film, Johnnie Burn. One of the Oscar nominations the movie earned is for sound. He was recently interviewed about how he and the director, Jonathan Glazer, tried to reveal how ordinary people can quickly become accustomed to horror. Here are few snippets from that interview:
Jonathan was about to start the picture edit and he needed a sound for the crematorium. There’s the film you see and the film you hear. When I had read the script, I thought: “Jesus, for the sound to carry off the intent of the film – its juxtapositions and responsibility to history – how do you respectfully reproduce the sound of mass murder?” It was complex.
To recreate the sound of the crematorium, Burn goes on to explain how he put a microphone in the chimney above his fireplace, using cardboard to manipulate the rhythm. “I started adding footsteps of people we’d recorded on production and the sounds of textile and armament machines”, he explained. “That sound – the machine of death, the very soil of the place – became a shorthand. It subverted the need for sensationalization”.
Glazer started using Burn’s recording incidentally before deciding to keep it as a constant background rumble. The noises are guttural, near primordial, and seem to play in the characters’ subconscious; the sounds of sporadic gunshots during lunch, or distant screams while the Höss children are tucked into bed, are made all the more chilling by how little they respond to them.
To achieve this dissonance, Glazer had the family drama filmed first, using multiple cameras throughout the house so that the actors never knew which they were playing to, and only added the camp sounds in post-production. “It was very much a case of making it as credible as possible – an immersion into the everyday mundanity and humdrumness of real family life”.
For the shoot, Glazer was given permission to film outside the camp but chose not to use the actual Höss home – which still stands but is privately owned – instead, building it afresh, as it would have looked at the time. The results are uncanny, a tacit denial of historical distance that Burn responds to in his sound design. “It needed to feel like a found document, one with no patina or sepia edge. I think the most direct way to connect with people is to say: “look at this, this is real, it could be now'”.
To create the library of sounds, Burn researched for over a year – interviewing survivors, scouring the Auschwitz archive and reading whatever literature he could find:
I was looking at anything that referenced sound. In witness testimonies, for example, I learned there was a roll call with a bugle, people also said that the electric fence was audible, it had a kind of buzz and rattle to it.
Working from this information, Burn recreated the sound of a person using the fence to attempt suicide but chose to cut it out. “I felt the responsibility of not sensationalizing anything. I was also aware that we were painting pictures in people’s heads based on the collective knowledge we all have”.
Glazer’s approach was to strip back wherever possible. This is clear from the opening scene – or lack thereof – when the warped and thunderous overture plays over an entirely black screen, which suddenly gives way to a bucolic image of the Höss family picnicking by a lake. The huge descent and then the birdsong, what a way into a film. The unintended consequence was that it also said: “use your ears”.