Realism and inhumanity in Son of Saul

The Hungarian Oscar-winning film Son of Saul is both shockingly and distressingly realistic while also in some ways it's hard to believe. Of course every Holocaust film (and novel and memoir) is hard to believe - can these things really have happened? So recently? So nearby? But this film in its attempt to build drama creates a conflict that I just never could buy into, at least on a realistic, literal level. The main character and the focal point of nearly every shot in the film is a Hungarian Jew, named Auslander (foreigner, or outsider perhaps) who is one of the slave laborers in an unnamed concentration camp, part of a team with the repulsive job of leading the newly arrived people into the shower rooms where they are gassed to death - then going through their belongings looking for coins or jewelry, carting out the dead bodies, scrubbing the chambers, incinerating the dead, and disposing of the ashes. Horrendous. What we learn also is these crews are put to work for a few months and then murdered (presumably to minimize the chance that these operations will be reported to the world). Auslander seems to recognize one of the dead - he says it's his son, Saul, but this may not be true and becomes obsessed with giving this boy a proper burial, complete with a rabbi reciting the Kaddish. As Auslander goes about through various bribes and subterfuges to make this happen, he's also part of a prisoner's rebellion, in which they manage to get some guns and break free from the camp, at least for a period of time. I am by no means an expert on these matters, but I don't think there were any such successful uprisings, and from all I've read I don't think any of the prisoners would be thinking about a proper burial for anyone - they were so immured by death and starvation that they, rightly, were thinking only about survival, and perhaps about the guilt they must bear for what they have seen and done, against their will. For a more honest, I think, account of a similar situation read Ketesz's novel Fatelessness. On the plus side, however, painful as it may be few films bring you so directly into the experience of living in the camps: excellent hand-held documentary-style footage, with a "deep focus" lens that keeps the foreground sharp and the background - stacked bodies, armed guards, beatings, harassment - blurred and indistinct, as in a dream, with a seemingly live soundtrack - the constant haranguing of the guards, the loudspeakers, the barked commands, the inhumanity: a difficult film to watch, but a powerful and unusual viewpoint on these horrors.