Jake Paltrow On ‘June Zero’, His Film Set In Early 1960s Israel During Adolf Eichmann’s Final Days – “A Very Large History, But From A Very Small Lens”
deadline.comIn 1961, a key architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was tried in Israel and sentenced to death. An odd thing happened.
Officials didn’t want to bury him and risk creating a shrine, so they decided on cremation. That is strictly against the Jewish religion and there were no crematoria in the country.
So Shlomi Zebco (played by Tzahi Grad), a former Israeli paramilitary soldier who owns a commercial oven factory, was asked by the government to make one big enough to incinerate Hitler’s former top lieutenant, handing him a manual with instructions – in German.
Zebco’s assistant realized with horror the model was used in Nazi death camps. The story is told from three points of view: of a 13-year-old Jewish Libyan boy who is kicked out of school, finds a job at the factory and helps build the oven; Eichmann’s guard, a Moroccan Jew tasked with keeping the Nazi alive until his execution, neurotically seeing threats to his charge’s life everywhere; and a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, who served as the chief interrogator at the trial.
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