Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Early in The Commandant’s Shadow, a scene speaks to something universally human. An elderly man returns to the two-storey house in southern Poland where he spent his childhood. “I remember it bigger,” he says, a cliché grounded in a truth we all recognise. His tone is deeply wistful. Sweet visions of the past engulf him. This, he says, was “my little kingdom.”Now as then, the house stands next to the site of Auschwitz. The old man in a reverie is Hans-Jürgen Höss, son of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant whose family life in this tidy villa was recently the subject of Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning re-enactment The Zone of Interest. Glazer showed us the Höss children frolicking over the wall from the crematorium. In Daniela Völker’s careful, startling documentary about the Hösses and the legacy of the Holocaust, real life picks up 80 years later. There are euphemisms that could have come straight from Glazer’s film. (The man who lived here as a boy now says the house was close to his father’s “workplace.”) More frequent is pained silence. It could hardly be otherwise, given the impossibility of Völker’s central question: what contrition do we expect from the descendants of the guilty? Hans-Jürgen is one model, cowed by the scale of his father’s actions into what can appear wilful ignorance. Another comes with his sister, Brigitte, who relocated to the US and still adores the man she calls Vati. Or then there is Hans-Jürgen’s son Kai, now a pastor in Stuttgart and agonised by what it means to be the grandson of the biggest mass-murderer in history.Horror is everywhere, but Völker wisely holds her focus on Auschwitz alone. And she reserves half the film for Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. As a German-Jewish child, this sharply brilliant woman survived the camp. We meet her, now 98, in London, amid the troubled landscape of her relationship with her daughter, the psychotherapist Maya Lasker-Wallfisch. Another impossible question: how many generations does it take the living to escape a Rudolf Höss? Völker’s film is again too honest to pretend to know. It can only be an unfinished tragedy. ★★★★☆In UK cinemas from July 12 and on Max in the US from July 18
