Screening as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival, Jake Paltrow’s engrossing June Zero is the latest in a line of films and documentaries revolving around the story of Adolf Eichmann.
However, this is not another dramatisation of daring Mossad agents snatching Hitler’s henchman in Argentina and bundling him back to Israel.
Instead, Paltrow takes an intimate approach to events at the end of the trial, as Israelis awaited the outcome of Eichmann’s appeal for clemency, by exploring them through the experiences of three disparate characters — a boy, a prison guard, a Holocaust survivor — based on real people.
“It’s like doing the Lincoln assassination from the point of view of the costumer or the stage hands,” he explains. The way Tom Stoppard made two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet protagonists in his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, also comes to mind.
The son of actress Blythe Danner and younger brother of Gwyneth Paltrow, the 47-year-old filmmaker says his interest in the Holocaust began when he was quite young, encouraged by his father, the producer and director Bruce Paltrow, who was born into a Jewish family that emigrated to New York from Europe. He died of cancer in 2002.
“He was quite obsessed by it in certain ways,” says Paltrow. “There were lots of books and conversations. We used to watch The World at War every year, and I think that was the first time I had been exposed to those images and things, and he was explaining it to me.
“I’d like to think I’d be interested in this no matter what my background was. But when you have a parent who’s sort of invested in it, just by exposure I would imagine there’s a certain influence that is strong.”
Paltrow says he related to a moment in the recent TV adaptation of Philip Roth’s alternative history novel The Plot Against America, where a man is asked what it means to be Jewish. “He says, ‘You know, my father was a Jew, and I believe in him.
Eichmann in the dock during his trial in Jerusalem (courtesy of GPO Israel)
"And he believed in his father, and he believed it; and on and on and on.’ I remember watching that and feeling like, ‘That’s it! That’s perfectly articulated everything about my Jewishness.’ And losing that person [his father] sort of young, I think it’s connected to that fact.”
June Zero is connected to two discoveries that grabbed Paltrow’s attention. The first was how a factory clandestinely built an oven based on a German blueprint to cremate Eichmann’s corpse; the second was that the men who guarded him were all Mizrahi because of concerns that an Ashkenazi Jew with a “familial link to the horrors of the Shoah” would try to assassinate him.
Intrigued, Paltrow visited Israel in 2018 and met people who had been at the factory in Petah Tiqwa in 1962. These included David Oren, who claimed to have worked on the oven as a boy.
“We interviewed him and he seemed to have all this very detailed sort of history,” says Paltrow. “And then we talked to other people who worked there, so that we could confirm he worked there, and they said that he didn’t.”
This made him even more fascinating to Paltrow, as it “opened up into engaging in the idea of contested history, especially as it relates to Holocaust narratives” — a theme running through the film.
As Oren was Mizrahi it also gave Paltrow and his co-writer, the Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval, an opportunity to put on screen some of the tensions that existed in Israel between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews.
Another scene from June Zero
One character in the film, schoolboy David (Noam Ovadia), a recent arrival in Israel with his family from Libya, is told Jews are a people, but is made to feel that some Jews are more equal than others.
“I think outside of Israel, a lot of people, even a lot of Jewish people, don’t necessarily know a lot about that clash at the time, those sort of Mizrahi-Ashkenazi dynamics,” says Paltrow.
“So the fact that it was something that could grow naturally out of the story was so compelling.” I ask him if Oren ever cited prejudice as a possible reason for why no one corroborated his story. “No. And I don’t know if we asked him that. Because I don’t know if we knew at that point that this would be such a component of the story itself.”
David is not the only character who encounters disbelief. Micha (Tom Hagi), a character based on Michael Goldman-Gilad, an investigator for Bureau 06 who took depositions for the Eichmann trial, tells a Jewish Agency worker how he was shamed into silence after an Israeli immigration officer dismissed his journey from ghetto to refugee camp, via Auschwitz, as a figment of his imagination. “All he saw was a gaunt, desperate man,” he tells her.
Their conversation is a fascinating discussion about how we should remember, and why. Micha sees himself as a living fossil, given purpose by the number tattooed on his arm. He wants his story to be heard.
And it is, in a powerful monologue told among the ruins of the Polish ghetto where, as a child, he received 80 blows from a Nazi — Goldman-Gilad called not being believed the 81st blow. Ana (Joy Rieger), the agency worker, believes that Micha’s trauma is his and should be kept private. Israel exists, she argues, and no Jew should have to justify having their own country by publicly reliving their pain.
Taking his cue from Claude Lanzmann, the director of the monumental documentary Shoah, Paltrow chose not to use any archive material. When he shot in the Polish ghetto (actually a location in Kyiv), he used what he calls a “ghost camera” to trace Micha’s words, spoken off screen, through the empty space — a space which, in the absence of his witness testimony, would show no signs of what happened there.
The Eichmann trial was a watershed moment, he says, because it was the first time that survivors’ stories were truly believed. Goldman-Gilad’s emerged when a witness from his ghetto recalled seeing a boy being beaten.
When chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner asked, “Is that person here?” they pointed at Goldman-Gilad. “I think exactly what Micha says in the movie is exactly Mickey’s real feelings,” says Paltrow, who met Goldman-Gilad, who is still alive at the age of 97.
“Which are, ‘If this hadn’t come to pass it would have been something buried. And only through the process of my people hearing this, and now finally believing what had happened in Europe, does the dam of shame sort of fall.’”
Eichmann’s execution, and the irony of his body being fed into an oven built to the same specifications as those in the Auschwitz crematoria by a Holocaust survivor, brings no great swell of catharsis.
Justice has been done in legal terms, but Paltrow gives us time to quietly reflect on the idea that, for the survivors, the pain and the trauma go on.
For a crime of such enormity as the Holocaust, there is really no way to “quantify justice”, says Paltrow.
Goldman-Gilad told him that the best that anyone can expectfrom the judicial process, is that their experience is “catalogued, remembered, and put in order”.
This ordering of experience and events is today being threatened by a tide of Holocaust denial that is being spread, largely, using the internet.
While this and surging levels of antisemitism around the world were not necessarily foremost in his mind when he embarked on June Zero, Paltrow says: “I think engaging in the process of even being interested in telling a story like this certainly has to do with that, to a degree.”
Making the film gave him and Shoval a way of “articulating thoughts that we didn’t have fully completed,” he says, “but that we feel and talk about”. His hope now is that “maybe some other people that can’t articulate some things feel that way in seeing it, too.”
June Zero receives its UK Premiere at the UK Jewish Film Festival on November 13 ukjewishfilm.org
