If this is a father

Abstract

In the film by László Nemes, Son of Saul (2015), the main character finds a dying child who has survived the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, whom a SS doctor suffocates with his own hands. The scene of this murder confronts Saul (Géza Röhrig) within his limits as a living being; then he decides with determination that this body will not be added to the machinery of death which is the death camp and desperately looks for a rabbi to bury him. This article analyzes the enigmatic obstinacy of this character in relation to the limits of human life that Nazism put on the line Nazism, and to the visual boundaries of horror representation that the film presents. Because precisely, in the radical meeting point between the edge of the images and the edge of death, a space to imagine human life, despite everything, it’s opened up.