A Bold Act of Reclamation

A perverse form of justice for more than 1 million souls murdered.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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The commandant of Auschwitz’s house next to a Nazi guard tower. (Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Nearly two years ago, I went to Auschwitz on a press trip. I was in transit there on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas attacked Israel. If evil can be made manifest, here it was, both in the flame-tinged past and in the blood-filled present — and, as we would soon find out, in the future, when Israel would retaliate by pounding Gaza into oblivion.

I read yesterday that the commandant of Auschwitz’s private villa has been sold to the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based nonprofit, and is being turned into a part of the camp visitors can enter. It’s hard to describe the absurdity of the disconnect of the beautiful house with a backdrop of the most organized mass murder perpetrated in the 20th century. The house literally overlooks an early Nazi gas chamber as well as domino rows of barracks where hundreds of thousands of Jews and other prisoners starved and died. That’s perhaps why the film about the house released that year, “The Zone of Interest,” is so powerful — it doesn’t try to describe the indescribable, it merely presents you with audio and images that express the twisted story.

While at Auschwitz, I marveled at the family who lived after the war in the former house of Rudolf Höss, the commandant. Who in their right mind could peacefully live in a place from which you could see the grounds of ultimate horror? From my post:

The villa of the former commandant of Auschwitz is large and nestled amid a sentry of green cypress trees not far from the camp’s first small crematorium, which remains intact because the Germans later used it as a bomb shelter. Now there is a gate that separates the house from the camp because people live there.

Before the war, the house belonged to a Polish family. After the war, it was returned to them. So people live there now, with a view of the gallows used to hang former commandant Rudolf Höss. There was so much to be repulsed by in our tour today, but learning this floored me. Who would choose to live in a place like this?

I was about to end this piece with the brief story of seeing this house. But then I looked it up.

I found this story about a woman named Anna Odi who grew up after the war next door to the villa, inside what used to be the camp’s administration building. Her father had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. He moved there after the war to protect the remains of the camp, to protect the memory of what happened there. As a child, Odi played in the garden with her neighbor who lived in the villa. Now Odi works for the Auschwitz memorial’s collections department, which contain drawings by prisoners and other artifacts.

I will ask our guides tomorrow if they know whether the people who now live in the villa are in any way involved with the memorial. But not knowing leaves the question open as to whether we choose to remember or forget, the question of whether we are willing to face ugliness over and over again. Are the people in the villa like Odi intrinsically linked to the complex, insistently remembering the past, or are they electing to forget, to live their lives in a beautiful house in a hideous place, choosing not to see the ghosts of the dead?

Unfortunately, the ghosts of the past never leave. Deciding not to look at them does not mean they don’t haunt the world.

Grazyna Jurczak, 62, is the woman who lived in the house for 42 years after the war. She told The New York Times recently that the house was “a great place to raise children.” She brought up her two sons there.

Sometime in 2023, Jurczak decided it was time to vacate.

“I had to get out of there,” Jurczak said. But she didn’t come to that decision because she was finally sick of living in a house of death.

One reason, she told the Times, was that “she was disturbed by people who, after watching ‘The Zone of Interest,’ were tramping through her garden, peering through her windows and reminding her of her home’s connection to the Holocaust.”

It’s a shame to be reminded of inconvenient history, I guess.

Since the house has been sold, workers have found Nazi remnants, particularly in the attic, including a former prisoner’s uniform, a coffee mug embossed with the SS symbol and WWII-era newspapers.

Regardless of what happens to this house on the land of nightmares, I will never not revel in a simple act performed by the new owners of the villa: They attached to its front doorway a mezuzah, a parchment inscribed with biblical verses. I may not be religious, but neither is the mezuzah, necessarily. Beyond the promise of a covenant with God, it also announces to visitors that this particular house is a Jewish household.

It is a bold act of reclamation as the world again comes for the Jews, as it is coming for the Muslims and so many other minorities. Affixing a mezuzah to a house like this is nothing less than a perverse form of justice for the more than 1 million souls murdered beyond its grounds.

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