I was amazed at how accurate this film was and at times thought parts of it had been filmed in the actual Birkenau death camp which is now a Polish State Holocaust Museum. It was filmed in Bulgaria and for filming purposes the producers re-created the Auschwitz-Birkenau Crematorium area from the original Nazi plans. The scene builders deserve favourable praise for the care taken to get it right. They also did an excellent job of rebuilding the notorious Auschwitz basement prison known as Barracks 11 whose prisoners were shot each Saturday morning without fail. If it had included the following historical information it would have served a useful 'schools purpose' by educating the public and school students because very few people today have heard of Auschwitz and are aware that Birkenau was a sub-camp of it. This film lacked a sound recording of Hitler ranting on about the Jews, old newsreels of Nazi torchlight processions and shots of Synagogues burning with Jewish families -RIP- fleeing their homes during the night with one of the sons becoming a leading character through out this film. Events then take a routine course thats if murder can ever be considered routine - it can't. The film needed an office area where mass murder decisions were taken whilst coffee was being drunk and served by prisoners. The camp commander Hoess and sub-commander Kramer needed to be seen. The events shown in this film are real enough except the young girl who survived gassing was in reality shot and then thrown into a crema-furnace soon after her discovery. What the film lacked was some mention of the mass shootings taking place and the serious prisoner starvation that occurred. Maybe scenes of the railway train guards stood laughing and joking at the fate of the disembarking passengers might have aided realism and a guard stealing goods or offering to buy watches would have been added the right touch. Also where was Canada? the camp area in which dead peoples luggage was sorted in bulk. The film failed to mention that the 4 women -RIP- who stole the explosives were executed by hanging in front of the other prisoners. A nice ending to this film would have been the four Nazi Hoess, Kramer, Mandl and Irma Grice being hung with the trapdoor banging loudly as it opened wide. It needed the monster from hell Dr Mengele in disguise sneaking aboard a ship leaving for Argentina and maybe the Hatikvah Jewish Anthem being sung. This is a great documentary but not a great film and the subject was harrowing. The Oscar went to the Jewish male actor who lost his temper in the undressing room before entering the gas chamber. A camp lawyer amongst the prisoners would have been a welcome addition to the cast if his words were used to remind the world that this was murder and not explainable in any other way than murder. What you saw in this film actually happened and for that reason alone it deserves to be shown worldwide as a stain on all societies especially Germany.

I had a hard time getting to sleep after watching The Grey Zone. It is the darkest film I have ever seen. It is a stark contrast to Schindler's List in the fact that it is focused on the experience of the great majority of the people who were sent to the death camps and died. Nobody helped them. It is also raw in its presentation of the gas chambers, crematoria and the Sonderkommandos, Jews who volunteered to do the dirty work of processing the people who arrived at the camps and then their dead bodies afterwards in exchange for a few more months of life.That takes nothing away from the extraordinary Schindler's List, as it is very important to show the deeds of people like Oskar Schindler. His story and the story of many others like him is also true. In my opinion watching both films makes for an effective portrayal of the Holocaust on film, and an exploration of the nature of evil and humanity.Although the Grey Zone is a bleak story of utter human depravity, the darkness is not total. In an extraordinary turn of events that actually happened in October 1944, the very people who at first abandoned their morality to keep themselves alive threw the Nazis' deal back in their faces and sacrificed themselves, taking a part of the Auschwitz death factory with them. Their actions suggest that even though it flickers, the eternal flame that makes us greater than what we may appear to be is always present within.

This is truly one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen. If the goal of a great movie is to make its viewer changed forever, "The Grey Zone" certainly has succeeded. Yes it is not "Schindlers List". It has no uplifting theme, other than that in the face of no hope, doomed individuals tried desperately, if for nothing else, to save one life among millions of doomed. In the end even that effort is futile.It's images are haunting.Do to its depressing topic and even more disturbing ending others have criticized this movie as not being "entertaining". In fact it is entertaining. It is a horror movie of the real kind. The horror of human evil based on prejudice and hatred.Everyone needs to see this movie, with the exception of those who lived through it, as they already know!

Despite all the realism depicted in THE GREY ZONE amid the actual day to day operations of a Nazi prison camp, there's a certain stage quality in the dialog that serves as a reminder that you're watching the screen version of a stage play and not what should seem more like a true life documentary. That's the fault of the script taken from David Mamet's play and other eye-witness sources--but the acting is excellent.And yet, it does manage to convey just how those prison camps used other prisoners to operate the gas chambers, to carry out the deed with false promises--"Just be sure to remember where you hook the clothes so you can pick up your belongings when you leave"--and the backbreaking jobs of loading trucks with dead bodies and depositing them on chutes that go directly into a blazing furnace. Amid all this, various stories are entwined involving the petty quarrels among the men assigned to these tasks so they could prolong their own lives for at least four months of assured survival.The story involving a girl who does not die during the twenty-minute gassing and is then revived and how the men argue over how to protect her from further harm, is intense and touching in that it shows the humanity that is still in their souls. Her story and how it ends is one of the film's most memorable and touching elements.This is more of an in depth look at "the final solution" than any other recent films dealing with the extermination of Jews has ever been, with the exception of SCHINDLER'S LIST and THE PIANIST in which the accent was more on the triumph of the human spirit and a much broader view of the war itself in epic mode.This is a darker, intimate look at the actual operation of the camps as experienced by a handful of prisoners--the brutality, the torture, and raises the question: how far would you go to survive? It also shows how not all the Jews were as passive about their fate as some have claimed, often opposing the Nazi officers and paying for it with their lives.In the hands of a greater director, it might have been an even more impressive film than it is, so that I'm unable to place it in the same class with the two films mentioned above. The cast is uniformly good, but HARVEY KEITEL is outstanding as an SS Commander keeping strict tabs on the camp's hard-working doctor.In its own way, it's just as important. Young students of history would be well advised to view this one for a better understanding of how "the final solution" was supposed to occur and the methods used to carry out an enormous project known as "the holocaust".