Published June 10, 2024

Peter Black

May 22, 2024

Local Journalism Initiative reporter

peterblack@qctonline.com 

The women are in the kitchen having coffee. 

“She asked me where I got one of my jackets from. I said Canada. She asked me, ‘When did I get to Canada?’” The women laugh. One says, “She thought you meant the country.”

“An understandable mistake,” says the lady of the house, the concentration camp commandant’s house.

The scene comes a few minutes into the Oscar-winning movie The Zone of Interest, now available on Prime. If you haven’t seen it, or you did see it and missed the quick reference to “Canada,” there turns out to be a horrific story behind how “Kanada” became associated with one of the grim aspects of the Holocaust.

The “Kanada” to which the women referred was the name for the huge warehouses the Nazis built at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland to store, sort and distribute the possessions confiscated from the more than one million mostly Jewish prisoners who arrived at the camp destined to labour as slaves or to be executed.

It’s unclear how exactly the warehouses – Kanada 1 and Kanada 2 – came to be called Kanada, but according to Holocaust history sources, it was Jewish prisoners themselves who gave the buildings the name, which their Nazi captors adopted. Someone, presumably had the idea in mind that Canada was a place of great abundance. 

(We might interject here that despite the positive thoughts Jewish concentration camp prisoners may have had about Canada, at the time the Nazis were rounding up Jews for extermination, the Canadian government was systematically rejecting Jewish refugees from Europe.)

In the movie, Hedwig Höss, wife of Rudolph Höss, the long-serving commandant at the sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination centre, receives bundles of clothing delivered in a wheelbarrow by a Jewish prisoner. 

She tries on a fur coat and discovers a tube of lipstick in a pocket. She applies the lipstick, then quickly wipes it from her lips, realizing a Jewish woman was the last person to use it.

The volume of goods taken from new arrivals at the camp was staggering. Jews and other Nazi targets from cities and villages in Poland and elsewhere had no idea where they were headed when ordered to bring up to 100 pounds of possessions and then loaded on trains like animals, often travelling for days without food or water.

Upon arrival at the camp, guards took the prisoners’ goods, from clothing to books, musical instruments and jewelry, and stored them in a “Kanada” while their owners were either stripped and gassed immediately or forced into slave labour.

At their peak, in 1944, up to 2,000 prisoners, called Kanada Kommandos, were working at the Kanada warehousing operation. Most of the goods were shipped to Germany, but some ended up being worn by the commandant’s wife and her friends.

The Zone of Interest is a masterful cinematic expression of the “banality of evil,” political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s description of the methodical way in which the Nazis set about attempting to wipe out the Jews of the world.

The film is based on Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, drawn from the true-life account of the Höss family living an idyllic life in the Polish countryside, with industrial-scale incineration of human beings taking place on the other side of the garden wall.

We never see the grounds of the actual camp – its presence is suggested by the dull rumble of the crematoria and the sound of rifle shots. The only Jews seen are the family servants, including a girl whom Frau Höss admonishes, when she makes a small mistake, that her husband could have her ashes scattered. 

The film’s creator, Jonathan Glazer, opted to include the true story of a young Polish girl who would, secretly in the night, leave apples for the starving labourers at work sites near the camp.

Dare we say The Zone of Interest, winner of the Academy Award for best international feature film, would make an instructive film for screening during the long nights at the campus camp-outs in support of the liberation of Palestinians.

Real liberation of victims of true genocide occurred in January 1945 when a Ukrainian division of Soviet troops opened the gates of Auschwitz and began uncovering the extent of the Nazis’ “final solution.”

The retreating SS camp guards burned the Kanada warehouses to the ground, with whatever remaining goods in them going up in smoke.

            30 

Scroll to Top