The Grey Zone is a 2001 film directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino and Daniel Benzali. It is based on the book Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account written by Dr. Miklós Nyiszli. The title comes from a chapter in the book The Drowned and the Saved by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. The film tells the story of the Jewish Sonderkommando XII in the Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944. These prisoners were made to assist the camp's guards in shepherding their victims to the gas chambers and then disposing of their... bodies in the ovens. The film opens in October 1944, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. A small group of Sonderkommandos are plotting an insurrection that, they hope, will destroy at least one of the camp's four crematoria and gas chambers. They are receiving firearms from Polish citizens in the nearby village and gunpowder from the UNIO munitions factory; the women prisoners who work in the UNIO are smuggling the powder to the men’s camp among the bodies of their dead workers.
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