The Grey Zone (2001) on Netflix
In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Sonderkommando prisoners plot an uprising to destroy a crematorium and smuggle in gunpowder. Miklós Nyiszli, a doctor under Josef Mengele, fears for his family.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In October 1944 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Sonderkommando prisoners are forced to move victims into the gas chambers and burn the bodies in the ovens. A small group among them plans an insurrection that would destroy a crematorium. Polish villagers supply firearms, and women who work at the UNIO munitions factory carry gunpowder into the men's camp hidden among the bodies of dead workers. When the Germans learn of the women's activity, they torture them, and nothing about the plot is given away. The Hungarian Jewish doctor Miklós Nyiszli works for Josef Mengele in a medical laboratory, and Mengele has let him see his wife and daughter, who are held in the women's labor camp. Nyiszli believes that order keeps his family from the gas chambers.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Grey Zone (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the production, an 80 percent scale model of the Birkenau camp was built near Sofia, Bulgaria, using the original architectural plans.
- Harvey Keitel, who plays SS officer Eric Muhsfeldt here, took the opposite side of history the same year, playing a U.S. Army denazification investigator in the film Taking Sides.
SPOILER
Screen text at the end tells the audience that Muhsfeldt was hanged for war crimes after the Auschwitz trial and that Nyiszli survived the war but never practiced medicine again; the film closes with a voice-over recitation by the dead girl.- The film's title comes from a chapter in The Drowned and the Saved, a book by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi.
- The critic Roger Ebert returned to the film years after its release, including it in his "Great Movies" series in 2009.
