Striped Pajamas Inaccuracies

The movie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, tells a story about a German nine year old boy that befriends a Jewish boy in a concentration camp. The story takes place in Nazi Germany during World War II around 1940. The story line is in chronological order with no major flashbacks. During this time period, Adolf Hitler brought the economy down. At this time, Germany was trying to recover from WWI. More than 6 million people were unemployed. Propaganda played a major role in society. Jewish people were constantly targeted and viewed as a threat to others and considered “less human” by the Nazi Party. Prejudice against Jews sparked the story line in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. The story starts when the protagonist Bruno, a 9 year old boy, that moves from Berlin to

The movie shows what life would be like for a Christian and German boy to be living in Nazi Germany. This film does shows an almost accurate version of a concentration camp. The camp had characteristics of what a typical camp would be like. Soldiers, smoke, and dead bodies were only few of the things it contained. Though this movie did have accuracies, it did have some inaccuracies. In the movie Bruno’s friend, Shmuel, was nine years old. There were also scenes that showed Shmuel doing work for the Nazis. A critic, Rabbi Benjamin Blech, stated that there were no nine year olds at Auschwitz. The Nazis would immediately gas them because they were too young to do heavy jobs. They were considered useless and unneeded. He also states that when children watch the movie, they may think that the concentration camp might not be “as bad as it seems”. The movie did a poor job at showing kids that concentration camps are indeed very dangerous. The fact that a nine year old Jewish boy befriended a German boy showed kids that camps “aren’t that bad” even though one’s life was at