When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Geopolitics

Boat Carrying Rohingya Muslims Capsizes Off Burmese Coast

AL JAZEERA (Qatar), REUTERS, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Worldcrunch

SITTWE – Rescuers were searching for survivors Tuesday after a boat carrying up to 200 Rohingya Muslims capsized off the western Burmese coast.

Many are feared drowned among the oft-persecuted minority, who were being evacuated late Monday from low-lying regions of Burma (also referred to as Myanmar) ahead of cyclone Mahasen, UN officials reported early Tuesday.

Barbara Manzi, head of the Myanmar branch of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), declared that the boat struck rocks off the Pauktaw township in Rakhine State, and sank late on Monday, Reuters reports.

Kristen Mildren, also of OCHA, told Al Jazeera that there were 200 people on the boat, and that there is only one confirmed survivor. OCHA told the Associated Press that eight bodies have been recovered since the boat sank, around midnight local time.

The passengers of the boat were Rohingya Muslims, a persecuted minority who had been living in refugee camps since violent clashes opposed Buddhists and Muslims in the area last year. They are denied citizenship by the government of Myanmar.

"We understand that yesterday evening they went out with the approval of government officials. This was part of an official government evacuation plan although the boats were not government boats. They were moving from a low-lying area to a safer area," Kirsten Mildren told Reuters.

The approaching storm, called Mahasen, is currently categorized as a tropical depression that could turn into a cyclone, and is expected to hit the coast of Myanmar at the end of the week. In 2008 a cyclone swept across Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta, killing up to 140,000 people, Reuters reports.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest