A full decade ago, I went to see The Duchess with some family friends. I was 16, almost 17, and I distinctly recall two trailers before the movie that left me thoroughly curious and a little apprehensive. I did not see either movie when they were released and continually put off seeing them, despite a huge number of opportunities over the years. One was The Secret Life of Bees. The other was The Boy In The Striped Pajamas. It's been on my Netflix list for a very long time and I finally watched it. Spoilers abound, but not very surprising ones. It's a movie about the Holocaust. Did you expect a cheery ending?
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is about an eight year old boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), living in Berlin with his family during World War II. He spends his days playing and going to school, until his father (David Thewlis) is promoted and they have to move "to the countryside." He's not super thrilled with the move, especially when he discovers there's no children to play with. When he peeks out his window, he sees what he thinks is a farm. Bruno sneaks behind his mother's back to go exploring and meets an eight year old boy, Shmuel, through the electrified barbed wire fence.
Thus begins a forbidden friendship. For all Bruno's naïveté he clearly knows he is not supposed to be friends with Shmuel. He never tells his family that he's made a friend and he knows Shmuel needs smuggled food. When Shmuel is cleaning wine glasses in the house and Bruno gives him a cake and they are caught, Bruno gets scared and denies the gift.
When Shmuel's father goes on a march and doesn't come back, the boys decide, very hastily, to dig beneath the wire, dress Bruno in stolen "pajamas," and go look for him. At not point does it occur to them that Bruno can't add very much to this endeavor but they're also eight. This goes exactly as well as you'd expect and the film ends with Bruno's parents sobbing and the camera staring at the door of a gas chamber.
So here's the thing: this was absolutely heart breaking. That much is true. But it felt like it was breaking my heart on purpose. Sure, the narrative made it clear that killing Jews makes you a bad person, but it also used dead and suffering Jews as a canvas to show the conflict the Nazi families dealt with.
Forgive me, but I don't really care. Perhaps the point was to show us that humans committed these atrocities. If you want to show me that, show me The Zookeeper's Wife where righteous goy brave the Nazis who were once their friends. Or show me any story that doesn't literally kill a child just so the narrative can teach a man who is killing people that when he kills people they die.
When I was a kid, I read a book. I forget what it was called. It was one of a myriad of "books about prepubescents and teenagers during the Holocaust" that my sister and I had, as I suspect most Jewish kids did. This one was about a girl who was a very active member of Hitler Youth, until she realizes her parents are hiding a Jewish girl and her mother (father? More family members? I read this book a very long time ago). She gets to know the girl and, like Bruno, learns that the things she's being taught by her teachers about Jews aren't related to watch Jews are like. I don't remember how that book ended, but it was a powerful story about learning you are wrong and that it's important to protect people who need help.
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas never tells us what camp makes up the back drop. A brief google tells me that in the book, Bruno calls the camp "Out-With." I guess the camp is supposed to be Auschwitz (my googling also tells me that was the only camp with four crematoria). I won't go into the issue I'm having with the book making up English versions of a German eight year old's speech impediments (apparently he calls Hitler "the Fury"). I haven't read it and have plenty to unpack with just the film. But if I ever read it, I suspect I'll be frustrated.
Per that same google, I've found every single source (mostly Wikipedia but for now that works for me) saying no children were ever put to work in Auschwitz. Anyone younger than a teenager was killed on arrival. I don't see anything on how they were killed, but there is no way eight year old Shmuel is working and making friends with the local Nazi kid.
I don't need every aspect of a movie to be historically accurate. In fact, if you made a movie about a child at Auschwitz struggling through living and working in a death camp, that could be a very powerful story. I do have an issue with changing history for the sake of humanizing war criminals.
The movie kills Shmuel when it is convenient rather than on arrival because that is when it makes the most narrative sense. A narrative about a little German boy who doesn't know anything but is privileged beyond belief and his family who thoroughly do know better. A family that only learns what they are doing is wrong because suddenly it affects them. The mother objects to the camp, but more so to her husband being the one doing it, not as much to the deaths of the Jews.
Oh and by the way? This movie wasn't based on a true story. Apparently a lot of people thought it was.
I am Jewish. My family is Jewish. My ancestors all emigrated to the US before WWI so I don't have any Holocaust survivors or refugees in my family but that doesn't mean the stories don't affect me. I'm going to say this very, very simply: the suffering and deaths of my people are not a backdrop for a story about the people who caused that very pain. And especially not to humanize them. I'm ok with thinking all Nazis were actual monsters. They deserve to be remembered with anger.
If you want a movie about the Holocaust, there's many many other ones, but watch one with a Jew as a protagonist.
It took me ten years of the movie trailer in the back of my mind to watch this. I wish I'd kept waiting.
*Obligatory special shout out to the old woman with the tattooed arm who came and spoke to my Hebrew school class. I don't remember her name or where she was from or even when she spoke to us. For all I can remember she might have come to my secular school. I just remember that she came*
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is about an eight year old boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), living in Berlin with his family during World War II. He spends his days playing and going to school, until his father (David Thewlis) is promoted and they have to move "to the countryside." He's not super thrilled with the move, especially when he discovers there's no children to play with. When he peeks out his window, he sees what he thinks is a farm. Bruno sneaks behind his mother's back to go exploring and meets an eight year old boy, Shmuel, through the electrified barbed wire fence.
Thus begins a forbidden friendship. For all Bruno's naïveté he clearly knows he is not supposed to be friends with Shmuel. He never tells his family that he's made a friend and he knows Shmuel needs smuggled food. When Shmuel is cleaning wine glasses in the house and Bruno gives him a cake and they are caught, Bruno gets scared and denies the gift.
When Shmuel's father goes on a march and doesn't come back, the boys decide, very hastily, to dig beneath the wire, dress Bruno in stolen "pajamas," and go look for him. At not point does it occur to them that Bruno can't add very much to this endeavor but they're also eight. This goes exactly as well as you'd expect and the film ends with Bruno's parents sobbing and the camera staring at the door of a gas chamber.
So here's the thing: this was absolutely heart breaking. That much is true. But it felt like it was breaking my heart on purpose. Sure, the narrative made it clear that killing Jews makes you a bad person, but it also used dead and suffering Jews as a canvas to show the conflict the Nazi families dealt with.
Forgive me, but I don't really care. Perhaps the point was to show us that humans committed these atrocities. If you want to show me that, show me The Zookeeper's Wife where righteous goy brave the Nazis who were once their friends. Or show me any story that doesn't literally kill a child just so the narrative can teach a man who is killing people that when he kills people they die.
When I was a kid, I read a book. I forget what it was called. It was one of a myriad of "books about prepubescents and teenagers during the Holocaust" that my sister and I had, as I suspect most Jewish kids did. This one was about a girl who was a very active member of Hitler Youth, until she realizes her parents are hiding a Jewish girl and her mother (father? More family members? I read this book a very long time ago). She gets to know the girl and, like Bruno, learns that the things she's being taught by her teachers about Jews aren't related to watch Jews are like. I don't remember how that book ended, but it was a powerful story about learning you are wrong and that it's important to protect people who need help.
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas never tells us what camp makes up the back drop. A brief google tells me that in the book, Bruno calls the camp "Out-With." I guess the camp is supposed to be Auschwitz (my googling also tells me that was the only camp with four crematoria). I won't go into the issue I'm having with the book making up English versions of a German eight year old's speech impediments (apparently he calls Hitler "the Fury"). I haven't read it and have plenty to unpack with just the film. But if I ever read it, I suspect I'll be frustrated.
Per that same google, I've found every single source (mostly Wikipedia but for now that works for me) saying no children were ever put to work in Auschwitz. Anyone younger than a teenager was killed on arrival. I don't see anything on how they were killed, but there is no way eight year old Shmuel is working and making friends with the local Nazi kid.
I don't need every aspect of a movie to be historically accurate. In fact, if you made a movie about a child at Auschwitz struggling through living and working in a death camp, that could be a very powerful story. I do have an issue with changing history for the sake of humanizing war criminals.
The movie kills Shmuel when it is convenient rather than on arrival because that is when it makes the most narrative sense. A narrative about a little German boy who doesn't know anything but is privileged beyond belief and his family who thoroughly do know better. A family that only learns what they are doing is wrong because suddenly it affects them. The mother objects to the camp, but more so to her husband being the one doing it, not as much to the deaths of the Jews.
Oh and by the way? This movie wasn't based on a true story. Apparently a lot of people thought it was.
I am Jewish. My family is Jewish. My ancestors all emigrated to the US before WWI so I don't have any Holocaust survivors or refugees in my family but that doesn't mean the stories don't affect me. I'm going to say this very, very simply: the suffering and deaths of my people are not a backdrop for a story about the people who caused that very pain. And especially not to humanize them. I'm ok with thinking all Nazis were actual monsters. They deserve to be remembered with anger.
If you want a movie about the Holocaust, there's many many other ones, but watch one with a Jew as a protagonist.
It took me ten years of the movie trailer in the back of my mind to watch this. I wish I'd kept waiting.
*Obligatory special shout out to the old woman with the tattooed arm who came and spoke to my Hebrew school class. I don't remember her name or where she was from or even when she spoke to us. For all I can remember she might have come to my secular school. I just remember that she came*
