The song, and the Holocaust survivor, behind the year’s most stunning moment in film
A young girl plays the song “Sunbeams” in Jonathan Glazer’sZone of Interest. Courtesy of A24
By PJ Grisar December 19, 2023
The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s drama about the humdrum home life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, starts and ends with composer Mica Levi’s chorus of shrieking voices and synthesizers that lead the viewer in and out of the hell roiling just out of frame. The sound design as a whole — crowded with distant screams, gunshots and barking dogs — paints a picture of what the screen never dares show. But the film’s most arresting aural moment is a simple melody played on piano by a young Polish girl.
Before she plays, a voice speaking in Yiddish introduces the tune as the work of Joseph Wulf, written in 1943 in Auschwitz III. As the music starts, lyrics appear in subtitles: “Sunbeams, radiant and warm/Human bodies, young and old; And who are imprisoned here, Our hearts are yet not cold.”
It is the film’s sole moment of direct Jewish testimony, and it is astonishingly voiceless. It was also, very nearly, forgotten.
Joseph Wulf, born in 1912 in Chemnitz and raised in Krakow, had a rabbinical education and was trained as an agronomist. His life changed course with the Nazi invasion. He and other Jews were restricted to the Krakow ghetto, where he knew the folk poet and songwriter Mordecai Gebirtig and painter Abraham Neumann. Wulf managed to escape and join the resistance but was captured in 1943 and deported to Buna-Monowitz, a subcamp of Auschwitz, for slave labor.
In the camp, Wulf vowed, if he survived, to commit his life to exposing Nazi crimes. As a member of the Jewish Historical Commission in Krakow after the war and a co-founder of the Centre for the History of Polish Jews in Paris, Wulf helped preserve the already famed work of Gebirtig and a lesser known composer named Jakub Weingarten. For all his diligence as a historian, Wulf didn’t rush to document his own songs from his time at Auschwitz.
“They are extremely obscure,” said Bret Werb, the staff musicologist of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. “He himself never did anything with them other than these home recordings.”
Around 2002, Werb found a reference to recordings Wulf made in the footnotes of a German dissertation. He wrote the author and learned the information came from a documentary by German journalist Henryk Broder, who had the tapes. Wulf, who organized singalongs for other laborers in the camps, recorded Hasidic melodies and songs by Gebirtig and Weingarten between 1966 and 1967 at a theater in West Berlin, accompanied by pianist Friedrich Schulz. He also taped two of his own, “Sunbeams” and a sentimental song about missing his wife. It is only through the recordings that we know the songs exist and have the audio of Wulf introducing and singing them. The voice heard in Zone of Interest was Wulf’s own.
“When he speaks the introduction, he’s like a dead man,” Werb said. “And then when he sings — he’s obviously not a professional singer — he’s not in tune or anything like that, but it’s so emotional.”
In July of 2021, Bridget Samuels, the music supervisor for The Zone of Interest, reached out to Werb looking for a piece of historical music. She wanted something that was from Auschwitz, in Yiddish and, preferably, unknown. Wulf’s song was the only thing that fit the bill. Werb says it’s an “unusual item,” in that a large percentage of music from the camps is in Polish, well known or had original words but a pre-existing melody.
There was a problem, however: the production needed a manuscript of the music for the scene. Most songs from the camps were unlikely to have been set down on paper.
“What they did was they made up these things and memorized them,” Werb said of inmates in the camps. “They didn’t write them down, and if they did write them down, they didn’t write the notes down.”
But, Werb was able to transcribe Wulf’s melody and the art department put together a prop — Werb found Wulf’s signature in a signed book to use on it — that looks authentic.
When we spoke, Werb hadn’t yet seen the film, for which he is credited, but was surprised by the context in which it was used. Its function, after many long scenes of the Höss family plundering the goods of prisoners — their lipstick, their perfume, even their false teeth — is to introduce a more abstract product of the camps: a mode of spiritual resistance we don’t see directly. Played on the piano by a young Polish girl, who found the music while planting fruit for the prisoners in the ditches where they dig, it is a radical expression of hope.
“We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night,” the subtitles read, as the piano plays under the unsounded words. “Souls afire, like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.”
Wulf fled a death march in 1945 and spent decades as a historian chronicling, among other subjects, how Nazi ideology left its stamp on art. Settling in Germany in the 1950s, he published the first documentary works on the Holocaust in German and campaigned to have a research center devoted to the study of Nazism in Wannsee, where Nazi authorities solidified the Final Solution, but was met with resistance. (The museum he imagined came to be in 1992, and its library is named for him.)
On October 10, 1974, Wulf jumped from the window of his apartment in Berlin. A few months before his suicide, he had written to his son, despairing over how little impact his life’s work had on German academics, who, historians have since reasoned, believed his scholarship as a Jewish survivor to be biased.
“I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans,” Wulf wrote. “There can be the most democratic government in Bonn – the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.”
As critic Jason Adams has noted, Wulf’s words could easily serve as a logline for Zone of Interest or a sequel set in the postwar period. But Rudolf Höss didn’t get to enjoy a long life after the war. He was hanged in 1947 in the last ever public execution in Poland after serving as a witness in Nuremberg; the evidence against him included an affidavit where Höss admitted to the “gassing and burning” of prisoners,.
While short on direct accounts of Höss’ crimes, the film hints that efforts like Wulf’s were not in vain. How strange, though, that it was a work Wulf never thought to publish, the melody and words he remembered, that will now serve as his best-known testimony.
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