The most meaningful statement for me at the recent Academy Awards ceremony was when the words of recently deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny flashed across the screen, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”

I taught history for a decade. I miss teaching it even more right now when the subject begs for our attention. At a critical moment in our history as a democracy, studying history helps us make sense of the past and how it relates to the present.

I was reminded of this as I watched Jonathan Glazer’s film “The Zone of Interest,” the recent Oscar winner for Best International Feature Film. The title is based on the German word “interessengebiet,” a term depicting the restricted zone around the Auschwitz concentration camp. It translates into “an area of interest.” It was used euphemistically by Nazi officers. It’s a movie about people remaining blind and deaf to horrors kept mostly out of sight and mind.

The reality-based story is about a Nazi commandant, Rudolf Höss, responsible for governing Auschwitz, and his family living in a beautiful countryside location immediately outside the walls of the camp.

While he spends his days overseeing the camp and planning more streamlined ways to kill people, his wife Hedwig and their children spend their days with birthday parties, flower arrangements, and holiday plans, tuning out steady low-level background sounds of shooting and screaming, chugging from trains arriving at the camps, and views of columns of ashy smoke coming from crematoria chimneys just across a protective wall.

It’s a film about evil, the tolerability of evil and the barely visible widespread complicity and commerce that turned evil into factories of death.

The film is perfect to use in a unit on the Holocaust. It’s an excellent resource for teachers and parents to teach kids about the dangers of apathy and the importance of facing up to evil.

Begin with the film. Let them know that although there are intimations of the horror inside Auschwitz, there is no graphic violence. I’d also ask them to pay special attention to the use of sound in the film.

While teachers always need to avoid using their teaching to proselytize, in this case there are not two legitimate sides. The Holocaust was a human horror. Raise questions for students and provide them with an opportunity to marshal facts to strengthen their viewpoints, not about whether the Holocaust happened, but about what German citizens could have done to keep it from happening.

Here are some good questions. Have students write quick responses and then discuss their ideas in small groups. Do this over a few class periods since they deserve significant time for responses and discussion.

Is Höss evil or just a bureaucrat doing his job? Is his wife, Hedwig, evil or just a good housewife and mother?

How do you distinguish between those who perpetrate evil through explicitly destructive acts and those who are complicit in the evil by turning a blind eye to what is happening? What examples are there in the film?

Were there also examples of a brave person or two trying to help?

The film also received an Academy Award for sound. So it might be interesting to ask students what the sounds were from the other side of the wall that Hedwig was experiencing and yet seemingly ignoring. These sounds included screams, gunshots, a railroad train transporting the victims and loudly barking dogs.

Then guide large group discussions with these additional thoughts to explore together. You might play the devil’s advocate and, for instance, argue that Hedwig isn’t evil; she’s just focused on being a housewife, not on politics. Or perhaps create a debate on the topic.

Finally, consider having them examine the question of how this has implications for us today. The director is explicit that the film is about more than the Holocaust, a movie about us, normal people as were most Germans. And we each should remember the words of Navalny. Being a good and upstanding person doesn’t resolve one’s responsibility to act in the face of evil.

Mark Phillips of Woodacre is a professor emeritus of education at San Francisco State University.