KZ

A Haunting Reminder
I had been waiting to see this unique film for quite a while. It isn't the easiest to track down. It is a beautifully shot, thoroughly engrossing look at life in the idyllic small Austrian town of Mauthausen. Idyllic, perhaps, but for the dark shadow forever cast across it by the Mauthausen concentration camp.

The film conducts a sort of virtual tour through both the camp itself, and the scenic town adjoining it. With elegance and understatement, the filmmakers manage to convey both the horrors associated with the camp, and the intrusive complications that are so much a part of live in the town.

The viewer's journey is conducted through a series of interviews with groups of school children and tourists, as they are led on their tour through the camp; as well as extended interviews with some of their tour guides, many of whom reveal complex and difficult relationships with the camp, and their roles as shepherds of the innocent through its haunting grounds...

Proximity to evil and suffering
History is all about proximity; the distance over time, between spaces, or the mental distance that we all create within ourselves to interpret and relate to the past, ourselves and our futures. KZ is essentially a question of proximity, too, examining how living near the town of the last concentration camp to be liberated affects tour guides and residents. Does it matter that you live within sight of where thousands of humans were tortured to death? Is the field where tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews remain just another field, or does it retain a quality unique to their memory and pain? And what impact does it have upon visitors, who seem so jovial upon arrival and then so solemn upon exit. How long does that memory haunt them, until the next cheeseburger?

This is a very powerful film and I think it ranks among the top ten of holocaust documentaries, or films about the nature of suffering and proximity.

KZ Review
an excellent documentary, very well done; you feel like you are at KZ taking the tour along with the tourists

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