Still, “Son of Saul” is no less harrowing to watch. Most of the atrocities remain just out of focus and almost out of range, as if Saul also tries to avert his eyes from the nightmare surrounding him. The camera angle remains tightly focused throughout the film on Saul’s upper body, often from the back of his head, so that viewers see what Saul sees. The 38-year-old director’s great-grandparents perished in Auschwitz. Saul now has a way to protest this most heinous insult to God and to human dignity. In trying to protect this boy’s body, which had housed a precious soul, Saul sees a chance to in some small measure counter the gruesome “work” that otherwise fills his days and nights.

He is now driven wholly by his determination to treat this one Jew, this one human being, with the humanity and respect that Jewish law mandates. Meanwhile, other Sonderkommando are planning a rebellion against their Nazi captors, yet Saul is now distracted from that mission. The man answers, “I’m just another prisoner like you.” Still, he hides the body to help Saul try to fulfill his newfound mission. Now awakened from his almost stupor-like and unthinking role, Saul asks the man he believes is the doctor in the medical examining room not to cut the boy. So when Saul does speak, it has an added poignancy. What, after all, is there to say when your life is that of a slave forcibly participating in man’s most brutal inhumanity to man? Even the Sonderkommando know they may be killed at any time, perhaps shot on the whim of a Nazi guard.

He watches as a Nazi doctor kills the boy minutes later and requests an autopsy on this unusual “specimen.” Suddenly, Saul’s life has purpose: He wants to prevent the autopsy, forbidden by Jewish law, find a rabbi to say Kaddish, and try to give a proper burial for the child, his child. After filling the boxes with the Jews’ valuables to give to the Germans, he must move the corpses (“pieces,” as the Nazis grotesquely call the bodies) from the gas chambers and into the crematoria.īut when Saul discovers a young boy, somehow still barely alive even after the gas chamber, he becomes convinced the boy is his son. Marked with giant red “X’s” on the backs of their frayed jackets, Sonderdommando like Saul pick the valuables from the clothing of the Jews who have just stripped naked, even as he hears their screams from the “showers” behind the door. Saul is the traumatized, moving-by-rote prisoner in Auschwitz who must do the unspeakable work of the Sonderkommando. This plea, daring and heartfelt, is uttered by the character of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) in the haunting, harrowing Son of Saul, the debut film by Jewish Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes that has been nominated for best foreign film in the Academy Awards and already won the Golden Globe Award for a foreign film – a first for a Hungarian film.

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