Continued, Part 2 of 2: There Is No Garden Beside the Wall ☝🏼

The girl who carried apples through the darkness in The Zone of Interest is not only a figure from the past. Every society has moments when ordinary people suddenly discover that the wall between their private lives and the suffering of others has become morally impossible to accept.

In recent days, amid the violence in Iran, names and images have circulated of people who did not set out to become heroes but, in a decisive moment, chose to move toward the wounded rather than away from them: Hamid Mahdavi, the firefighter in Mashhad who carried an injured person; Mohammad Jabbari, the taxi driver in Karaj who held a door open for people seeking refuge; Behrouz Nikkhah, the volunteer medic in Fardis who was reportedly shot while carrying a wounded person; Ali Janani in Eslamshahr, who tried to save an injured woman; Hassan Shakhsi in Tehranpars, who went to the aid of the wounded; Afshin Miar Kiani, a taekwondo coach in Chalus and Mazandaran; Mohammad Javad Heydari, an MMA athlete from Masjed Soleiman; and others whose names may still be unknown to us.

None of these people necessarily woke that morning imagining that history would ask anything exceptional of them. None had been prepared in advance for the role of hero. What they did arose from something more elementary: the refusal to abandon another human being.

There is a profound moral distance between a duty defined as shooting at another person and a duty defined as carrying that person to safety. Both may be described in the language of duty, but the moral worlds they create are not the same.

At the end of The Zone of Interest, the film moves suddenly into the present and we see workers cleaning the Auschwitz museum. Shoes, suitcases and other remains of those who were murdered have become part of historical memory. The film seems to ask what finally survives once the machinery of power has disappeared.

Memory may be the last fortress against the normalization of evil. If names disappear, if stories are forgotten, and if those who helped and those who harmed become indistinguishable in a fog of forgetting, then the language of “necessity” can once again return to justify killing, execution and violence.

I believe the names of many of those who, in these two nights, chose humanity over fear will remain in the memory of Iran for centuries. They are small lights in an immense darkness, but history has often been written by precisely such lights.

The Shahnameh of every generation is not written only by kings, warriors and famous figures. It is written by ordinary people who, at the moment of moral decision, refuse to let fear decide who they will become.

Perhaps the new Shahnameh is already being written in our collective memory: in the names of people who, when confronted with suffering, chose to carry another human being rather than turn away.