“June Zero”: Testimony to the death of Adolf Eichmann

Micha Aaronson (Tom Hagi), an Auschwitz survivor, built the case against Eichmann; Haim Gouri (Yoav Levi) must endure the bleak irony of keeping the prisoner alive until his execution; and Shlomi Zebco (Tzahi Grad), a fearsome factory owner, has agreed to build a furnace to burn the body so Eichmann’s grave won’t become a Nazi shrine. Zebco’s apprentice is 13-year-old Libyan immigrant David (Noam Ovadia), a wonderfully hot-tempered rascal with expressive eyebrows who must keep his morbid side job a secret while his teacher berates him for assuming an Arab Jew is too ignorant and callous to understand the pain of the rest of the nation.

The film sets up these stories like a relay race, one citizen’s decision leading to another before they all collide in a deliberately anticlimactic climax. Eichmann, the audience already knows, is executed and burned, his ashes unceremoniously dumped into international waters with all the pomp he deserves. But while Paltrow (Gwyneth’s brother), who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Shoval, makes his own case that history is made up of small, individual actions that are often overlooked, he allows himself a little gallows humor. (One worker jokes that the prime minister might want his Eichmann medium rare.) Since cremation is forbidden in the Jewish faith, Zebco builds the country’s first incinerator, using, grimly, the blueprints of a real concentration camp. Zebco’s only hesitation, however, is that he would rather burn Eichmann alive. “I want to hear his screams,” he says lecherously. “More beautiful than Wagner.”

Zebco is no hero. He committed acts in the immediate aftermath of the war that even his allies call terrorism. Like the other characters, he is a fictional creation. But the horrors he boasts about, like the bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 people, are real. These are the tensions that the intelligent script seeks to explore. The film does not preach anything as simple as pacifist nonviolence; it simply seeks to point out that the scales of justice cannot balance the sins of one man against the need of millions of people for appropriate (and legal) punishment. Having kidnapped Eichmann from Buenos Aires, the Israelis, now responsible for caring for the killer, feel obliged to abide by an ethical code that runs counter to the moral transgressions he represents.

Eichmann appears in the film, but the actor is uncredited and his full face is never seen. There is a bit of revenge comedy when cinematographer Yaron Scharf introduces him feet first on the toilet while Beethoven’s “Pathétique” plays. Later, when Haim watches Eichmann sleep, the film turns horror-movie red as the paranoid chain-smoker frets like a young mother over his motionless body. Is Eichmann still breathing? Are assassins sneaking into the prison to kill him?

Micha sighs because the unimaginable number of victims of the Third Reich meant that he and his fellow survivors had a hard time convincing people that any of it even happened—the depravity was just too great. The witness testimony that led to Eichmann’s conviction was a key moment in entering the facts into the public record and getting the rest of the world to hear and believe them. When Micha travels to Poland to tell his own story to a group of visitors, Paltrow refrains from filming any reenactments. Instead, he makes the simple but dramatic choice to have the camera travel through time to trace Micha’s memories of his beating, capturing how he moved, stood and ran.

Two powerful monologues follow shortly afterwards, set up as a conversation between Micha and a Jewish Agency employee, a young woman named Ada (Joy Rieger). Micha explains what drives him to continue living in his trauma; she replies that being a ghetto tour guide turns him into a circus freak show. “I don’t want ‘Never Forget’ to become ‘Just Remember,'” she argues. The two cannot agree, and the audience that leaves the theater afterwards probably won’t either.

No rating. At the Landmark E Street Cinema. Features adult themes, a look at Eichmann’s body on the gallows and a shot of his charred skull. In Hebrew and Spanish, with subtitles. 105 minutes.