Quiet, safe and surrounded by greenery. And a view of a gas chamber. The house where Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, lived with his family will soon be open to visitors. The building, located just outside the camp, was made famous by the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer.
Until now it has been a private home. For the past 42 years, Grazyna Jurczak, now 62, has lived there with her husband, before he died, and their two children: 'It was a great place to raise the children', thanks to its proximity to nature and the river, and the absence of chaos. But after the release of Glazer's film, the decision to sell the house was reinforced by the streams of people who walked around the building, looking at it and remembering its connection to the tragedies of the Holocaust.
The building - as is often the case, but contrary to what we are used to thinking - generated the plot of the film, not the other way around. The value of the space as a witness to the events of Auschwitz inspired the director to shoot the film in a decidedly unconventional way: the actors were in the house (actually a faithful reconstruction, not the original) without any crew, with only the costumes and objects they would have found there in the 1940s, and the filming was done with hidden cameras.
Last October, the Counter Extremism Project - a New York-based organisation - purchased the house built for Höss with the intention of opening it to the public. In preparation for the opening, the CEP removed elements added after the war to restore the house to its original appearance between 1941 and 1944, when the German commander's family lived there. The building will not only be a place to visit, but also the headquarters of the "Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalisation", and the project to transform the building has been entrusted to the American architect Daniel Libeskind, who said he wanted to "empty" the interior spaces while leaving the exterior intact (the building is a Unesco-protected site).
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