A disturbing juxtaposition of youth and death underpins June Zero, a film based on the 1962 execution of Adolph Eichmann in Israel. Eichmann was a major Nazi organizer of the Holocaust and therefore considered one of the worst mass murderers of World War II. Mossad agents abducted him from Argentina and brought him to trial in Israel. This film by Jake Paltrow (brother of actor Gwyneth Paltrow) is a story where young people fill adult roles.
On July 24, 2024, the Dresser saw a screening of this hard-to-find American-Israeli film, which was released internationally July 1, 2022, but has only been available in United States theaters since June 28, 2024. The one-hour-forty-five-minute movie, shot entirely on 16mm film, is a drama in Hebrew and Spanish. Paltrow’s use of the low-budget 16mm film associates the movie with those made for documentary purposes. Given that the availability of the inexpensive 16mm film in the 1960’s allowed amateurs to make movies, the Dresser sees the director’s choice to use that medium in synch with the emphasis on telling this story from immature points of view.
The overall story of June Zero is bookended by the stories of two teenage boys. The film opens with David (Noam Ovadia), a thirteen-year-old Libyan immigrant. While he and his family are Jews, they speak Arabic and there is no hint that he is being prepared for the manhood ceremony of bar mitzvah. David tends to steal things and inappropriately interrupt his schoolroom and teacher. He gets suspended from school, so his father decides David should get a job. He takes him to a man with a reputation for killing Arabs who has a company making ovens. Metaphorically interesting, David’s father, just before they enter the oven factory, exchanges his shoes for David’s sandals. Thus, David is now walking in men’s shoes. David, despite his youth and his arrogance, excels and becomes part of a secret project to construct a crematorium that will dispose of Eichmann’s body once he is hanged. (The Israelis did not want Eichmann in death to have a martyr’s shrine. His cremated remains were, in fact, dumped beyond the Mediterranean territorial waters of Israel. The title of the film June Zero also reflects Israel’s insistence that the date of Eichmann’s demise would not be known and therefore never celebrated.)
The other story of a teenage boy is told by Micha Aaronson (Tom Hagi) who survives the Auschwitz concentration camp and provides evidence against Eichmann. In the film, he is now a man retelling the story of being whipped 81 times as a teenager in the Warsaw ghetto for not burning the bibles he was forced to collect. The location of this retelling is the postwar Warsaw Ghetto. A woman who apparently cares for Micha advises him to refuse to keep telling that story because he shouldn’t be a victim forever. However, Micha is stuck in his past as a horribly abused teenager. He needs to keep retelling the story for himself, so that he knows he has been heard and believed. What he has not come to terms with since that beating is the meaning of justice. He asks his friend, “What does justice mean?”
The center piece of the June Zero story belongs to the Moroccan-born guard Haim Gouri (Yoav Levi) who is charged with keeping Eichmann alive until his execution. It is Gouri who visits the fearsome oven factory owner Shlomi Zebco (Tzahi Grad) to assign him the secret task of making the crematorium which will reduce Eichmann to dust. Hounded by journalists, Gouri suffers an automobile accident after the factory visit which, while it doesn’t keep him from watching over Eichmann, causes him paranoid hallucinations like those a new mother would experience with an infant . At one point, Gouri, intent on keeping Eichmann alive for the justice of the hangman’s noose, thinks for a horrifying moment that Eichmann has died in his sleep. For Gouri, Eichmann has become his immature child. In this way, the central story has the specter of a youth with a shadow of death hanging over him.
Remarkably, Paltrow and his co-writer Tom Shoval, have made Eichmann a faceless figure in the film. We see his feet first and then we see the back of his head when a barber comes. This is much to Gouri’s consternation, because he fears that this man with scissors will kill his charge. In the film credits, the actor who plays Eichmann gets no recognition.
The standout actor in this film is Noam Ovadia who plays David. Our last image of him as a youth is when he is sacked by Shlomi Zebco who says his factory is no place for a boy. David fires back, “I love the factory and I’m better than all your workers.” Zebco tells him, “You’re just a kid. Get out.” The film ends with an adult David trying to convince an Israeli historian that he was involved with the cremation of Eichmann. He cannot produce any evidence, and she holds fast that she cannot accommodate his request to be included in that history. Here Paltrow and Shoval tie up a loose end—the involvement of a boy in building Eichmann’s crematorium may be nothing more than a myth.
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