The 2023 cinematic production The Zone of Interest won an Academy Award last month for Best International Feature Film. This powerful movie focuses on Schutzstaffel (SS) lieutenant colonel Rudolf Höss during his time as commandant of Auschwitz, the sprawling Nazi concentration camp complex in and around Oświęcim in German-occupied Poland. Auschwitz is the dramatic and psychological backdrop of every scene. The camp’s rooftops and chimneys—the latter belching ghoulish flames at night and black smoke during the day as murdered prisoners are incinerated—are visible throughout much of the film.

And yet, The Zone of Interest is not about Auschwitz. It is about Höss and his wife, Hedwig, whose house is located behind a camp wall that separates them from the horrors unfolding nearby. Mrs. Höss keeps what appears to be a happy home. She has a garden where she grows herbs for cooking and flowers to delight the senses. There is a small pool in the yard where their children, and the young of other Nazi families, frolic at play. Rudolf Höss, although kept busy as the commanding officer of a facility at the twisted heart of the Nazi enterprise, does his part at home, too. He attends garden parties his wife throws. He takes the children on swimming picnics and out on the river in his beautiful wooden canoe. He reads bedtime stories to the youngest of the Höss brood. He and his wife have made, not twenty yards from where innocent people are routinely beaten, raped, shot, and gassed, an idyllic haven for themselves and their family. In one scene, when Rudolf announces he is being transferred from Auschwitz to take on SS duties elsewhere, his wife refuses to leave. Auschwitz is, for the Hösses, a paradise. “Our Lebensraum,” Hedwig Höss declares.

This contrast, this impossible distance between what happens in Auschwitz, the concentration camp, and in Auschwitz, the adjacent home of the camp’s overseer, is the real subject of the film. How is it possible that on one side of a single wall can be found Hell on earth, and on the other the garden of earthly and gemütlich delights? Are the Hösses monsters? Sadists? Psychopaths? The troubling answer at which the film hints is: no, not exactly. It is from this deeply unsettling observation that the terror the film engenders in the viewer derives.

“I would never do that,” I was thinking as I watched The Zone of Interest. “I would never be able to live with myself if I were one of the Hösses at Auschwitz.”

“Dig a little deeper,” the film seemed to be telling me. “The wall between you and the Höss family might not be as thick or as high as you would like to believe.”

The disturbing familiarity of the Höss family’s home life haunts the viewer as it haunts the film. The Zone of Interest screams out—silently, in some scenes, and through nightmarish sounds and strained music in others—that the mechanism which enables the Hösses to live cheek-by-jowl with genocide, namely, their studied indifference to the destruction of innocent human life, is not an accident of history, and not at all foreign.

Hedwig Höss knows perfectly well whither the fur coat and lingerie and other windfall luxuries that she and her Nazi-wife cronies enjoy come from. In one scene, after her mother abruptly ends a visit, apparently in dismay over what her daughter has married into, she takes out her frustration by threatening a nearby Polish servant girl for her imagined insolence, telling her that her husband will spread the girl’s ashes across a field. But apart from this one outburst, the fact that the boxcar loads of people brought by train daily to Auschwitz are being systematically exterminated is treated as just another mundane aspect of daily life. Rudolf Höss comes home from his office with blood on his boots, and a servant in patched camp jacket rushes to wash them off. Other prisoners are conscripted as gardeners to maintain the Hösses’ greenhouse and rows of roses and kohlrabi. Human ash from the Auschwitz ovens is used to fertilize the flowerbeds in which Hedwig Höss takes much pride. The Höss children show signs of trauma stemming from an inchoate sense of what happens just behind their backyard wall. But, for all this, life goes on as usual. The house is cleaned, and dinner is prepared. The children are sent off to school and welcomed back home again. The seasons change. The beauty of nature is celebrated and enjoyed.

Pretending that all is well while the world goes to Hell around one—that is something that many living in 2024 will recognize. I know this kind of indifference very well. Many film critics have called The Zone of Interest timely, noting it has important lessons for our day. The film’s director, Jonathan Glazer, made his views on his work’s timeliness explicit during his Academy Awards acceptance speech, in which he decried the “dehumanization” surrounding recent events in Israel and Gaza. Much debate has swirled around these comments, and over whether The Zone of Interest is applicable to this or that war or persecution in one part of the world or the other.

But I have not seen it mentioned once in press stories about the film that living children are being cut into pieces daily in Planned Parenthood clinics across America. No film critic, to my knowledge, has acknowledged in a review the ongoing holocaust that has turned the United States into a living nightmare since 1973. In the abortion clinics we drive or walk by, an unfathomable slaughter continues. When pressed, many of us confess to knowing what happens on the other side of those walls. But we explain it away—a necessary evil, an unfortunate circumstance, a tragic necessity.

Rudolf and Hedwig Höss’s bifurcated world is not unlike ours. We too have made a home in our indifference to the fate of millions of our fellow human beings. In our aloofness to systematic violence, their mindset and ours are the same.