Film Review
The film, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is based on a 2006 novel by John Boyne. The novel tells a fictional story molded by real events of the persecution and the extermination of the Jewish in concentration camps across Europe by the Nazis. As for the film, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, it is a 2008 British-Irish historical-drama film directed by Mark Herman, produced by David Heyman, and starring Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Rupert Friend and Amber Beattie. The film is an emotional experience revealing the truth of the era through a boy’s innocent eyes.
The film shows the life of an eight-year-old boy, Bruno, who lives a wealthy lifestyle in circa 1940 in Berlin with his mother, older sister, and most importantly, his father who is a high-ranking SS officer, a commandant at a concentration camp. The family is required to move to the countryside when the father is promoted and put in charge of "something very important for the war". Already, Bruno was not all too thrilled to move but was convinced by his parents that he was moving somewhere great. From the window in his room, he spots an odd place he refers to as a farm because of its appearance. Bruno asks his parents why the farmers are wearing striped pajamas and they reply with an elusive answer that only pushed him into exploring the truth himself. The place Bruno refers to as a farm, is actually a concentration camp set up for the mass murder of the Jewish people or forced-labor. Prohibited to go even near there, is told by his father, "they're not really people" but, that did not kill the curiosity in the child’s mind.
Although told never to explore the woods beyond his back garden, Bruno eventually ventures out the...
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...executed upon arrival. If a child was not executed they would often be housed in the same barracks as the women. Also, late in the film Bruno easily sneaks into the camp with a just the assistance of a shovel to help Schmuel find his father. Accurately, it would have been nearly unmanageable to sneak into such a severely guarded camp especially, as a child. The concentration camps were strictly administered by the SS unit. They would guard the perimeter at all times and the camp was surrounded by dangerously electrical barbed fences along with ditches and a wall with guard towers. The film does not provide one with all the proper information needed to understand Germany during WWII. However, it does give a unique perspective on the Holocaust being that it was shown through the eyes of an innocent young boy and it does reveal the essential ideals of the Holocaust.
About 11,000,000 people died during the Holocaust, which was organized by Adolf Hitler. Hitler was Chancellor of Germany from 1933-1945 (12 years). There were about 23 main concentration camps during the Holocaust. Auschwitz was one of them. 6,000,000 of the 11,000,000 people that died were Jews. Shmuel could’ve been one of those Jews. Bruno could’ve been one of the other 5,000,000. The book might not have been true, but it was based on the truth. The movie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not as good as the book, because the book is more detailed, and interesting.
John Boyne’s book “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” is set in the area bordering Nazi Germany and Poland in the 1940s. The story concern a young German boy named Bruno, his family and the unlikely friendship he has between another boy named Schmuel, imprisoned in Auschwitz.
The book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne is about a young boy, Bruno, whose father is a soldier in the German army during WWII. Bruno lives with his parents and his older sister, Gretel. They live in a five story house in Berlin. He goes to school and has three best friends that he goes on adventures with. One day he comes home to find their maid packing his things. They move to a three story house in Germany because his dad was promoted and needs to be closer to his work.
The movie starts out in a Jewish home, where a Jewish family is celebrating the Sabbath. Candles are lit while songs are sung, and when the Jews leave the house, the candles slowly burn out. The German forces have just defeated the Polish, and now the Jews are being forced out of their homes. They are reporting to the train station where they register their names, and then are shipped off to Krakow. In Krakow the Jews are gathered together in the ghetto where they are forced to live in overcrowded conditions. The Judenrat, a Jewish council, organizes the Jews into working groups according to their abilities. Oskar Schindler, a German business man, visits the ghetto to talk to Itzhak Stern, a Jew who owns a pot-making factory. Oskar and Itzhak make a deal in which Schindler will take over the factory but Stern will be the plant manager. The Jews are once again sorted according to their education and working ability, those who cannot work are sent to extermination camps while some of those who are able to, reported to Schindler’s factory. The Nazi’s decide that all of the Jews should be confined in forced labor camps. Schindler, who is now starting to feel some empathy and responsibility towards his workers, volunteers to confine his workers in his factory.
The fates of children who arrived in Auschwitz were no different than the fates of adults. They suffered the same way the adults did. They were worked, starved, punished, and put to death and were a part of cruel experiments. Children who were selected for labor worked in factories or coal mines. In 1993 separate b...
“One of the most extraordinary aspects of Nazi genocide was the cold deliberate intention to kill children in numbers so great that there is no historical precedent for it.” (Lukas, 13 Kindle) About 1.5 million children were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust—one million being killed because they were Jews (ushmm.org) The Germans had a clearly defined goal of killing the Jewish children so that there would be no remnants of their race to reproduce, resulting in extinction. Not only were the children that were victimized in the Holocaust persecuted and murdered, but they were all stripped of their childhood. Children were not allowed to be children—they had to, for their own survival, be adults. The oppression of children because of race was a direct result of Hitler’s cruel policies and beliefs. In order to stifle the Jewish race from growing, the children were the first to be slaughtered at extermination camps (ushmm.org).
During the WWII the Germans conducted Holocaust of the Jewish race. The Germans invaded several different cities and countries and took the Jews to concentration labour camps and eventually killed them. The Germans killed approximately six million Jews all because of racial superiority. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is set in this era. The movie is also centered around the Holocaust where Ralph, Bruno’s father is a SS Commandant in the Russian army. He gets promoted and thus, the family has to relocate Auschwitz. Ralph is the commandant incharge of the Auschwitz concentration camp. His son Bruno, whose point of view we see the movie through, befriends a Jewish boy from the other side of the camp, which proves to have some starting and unexpected consequences. Meanwhile through the documentary we get to see the other side; the artifacts, blueprints and designs of the incinerators and interviews with various engineers to know the reality of how the Nazi were able to kill so many Jews.
It is challenging to imagine that a novel about the Holocaust could ever be comparable to a Grimm fairy tale, however, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Poverty and Humility Lead to Heaven maintain fascinating similarities through the stories of their respective main characters under ‘The Quest’ storyline framework that the pieces follow. Further, both Bruno and the Prince demonstrate senses of basic goodness and fall victim to family betrayal and crimes of status.
The treatment of Jews in this time period was abhorrent. The mere fact that Jews were placed into a death camp and exterminated was sufficient. In the film “The boy in the striped pajamas”, a moral issue arises in Germany in World War ll. This film reveals the racial discrimination and prejudice the Jewish people faced. Bruno who is an eight year old boy, is distraught after he learns that he has to leave his current home in Berlin to a new home in Auschwitz due to his father’s promotion to a Nazi commandant of a death camp. Arriving at their new home in Auschwitz, Bruno is lonely with no friends. From his bedroom window, he notices people in stripped pajamas behind a fence. He presumes they are farmers and asks his mother and father if he could meet some new friends on the farm. However, to his disappointment, he is told not to
The General way kids lived in the Holocaust was very bad and what they went through. Children would be forced out of their houses with their families. The first group of kids that were transported out of their countries were the ones who lived in Poland. They where forced to live in the ghettos. After they were forced our of there countries they would be forced into the ghettos with very little food and water and being a kid you not get very much food and a result to that they would die faster than the rest of the family. When children were into ghettos they would become orphaned and would have to raise each other. The houses that they lived in were so small they would be so cramped that people would have to live on the streets. The way children would die is when in they were too weak to work they would just kill the Jews. There was over 1 million kids killed during this time in the ghettos from infants to teenagers these kids were split up with there families and they were the first ones in the gas chambers. The Germans considered kids non productive so they killed them (“Childrens History”).
This book takes place during World War II in Hungarian Transylvania and in different concentration camps. The story begins at Eliezer’s home which is an apartment in a town called Sighet. Other settings in the book are the different concentration camps where Eliezer and his father are prisoners. In every location, Eliezer learns how to survive and grows more into a man.
Bruno, an eight year old boy at the time of the war, is completely oblivious to the atrocities of the war around him - even with a father who is a Nazi commandant. The title of the book is evidence to this - Bruno perceives the concentration camp uniforms as "striped pajamas." Further evidence is the misnomers "the Fury," (the Furher) and "Out-With" (Auschwitz). Bruno and Shmuel, the boy he meets from Auschwitz, share a great deal in common but perhaps what is most striking is the childhood innocence which characterizes both boys. Bruno is unaware that his father is a Nazi commandant and that his home is on ther periphery of Auschwitz. Shmuel, imprisoned in the camp, seems not to understand the severity of his situation. When his father goes missing, Shmuel does not understand that he has gone to the gas chamber.
The Holocaust seems to have become a common trope in cinema and literature recently rather than the focus. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is an example of how the Holocaust is being used as a vehicle for the plot of stories rather than the plot itself. Though the movie engages the audience and does a wonderful job of making the viewer sympathize and agonize over the tragedy of a Nazi family, the glaring inaccuracies and over-assumption of innocence show that the movie is not actually one about the Holocaust. Instead, it uses the Holocaust as a plot device to tell the unlikely tragedy of a Nazi family, two eight year old boys’ friendship, and their shared tragedy.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, by John Boyne, significantly distorts the truth of the Holocaust in order to evoke the empathy of the audience. This response is accomplished by the author through hyperbolizing the innocence of the nine-year old protagonist, Bruno. Through the use of dramatic irony, Boyne is able to both engage and involve the audience in the events of the novel. Although it is highly improbable that a son of a German high-ranking Schutzstaffel (SS) officer would not know what a Jew is and would be unable to pronounce both Fuhrer and Auschwitz, (which he instead mispronounces as ‘Fury’ and ‘Out-with’ respectively, both of which are intentional emotive puns placed by the author to emphasize the atrocity of the events), the attribution of such information demonstrates the exaggerated innocence of Bruno and allows the audience to know and understand more than him. This permits the readers to perceive a sense of involvement, thus, allowing the audience to be subjected towards feeling more dynamic and vigorous evocation of emotions and empathy towards the characters. Fu...
Bomba explained how people would walk through the “gate” and was never seen again. His job, along with sixteen or so other prisoners was to clean up the place so that when the next transport comes in, they would not see what was going on. His experience is very similar to the experience described by Mr. Mueller. Although they were in different camps, they were the experiencing the same torment. Ms. Farkas was deported to the Auschwitz camp where she worked in the kitchens to receive extra food. She was deported to another camp and later forced on a death march. Her experience is also very similar to Mr. Mueller’s. Toward the end of the war, he describes how he and other prisoners were forced on a death march. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas indirectly shows that there is no survival from the camp. Shmuel tells Bruno how his grandparents died shortly after arriving at the camp and later asks Bruno to help him look for his father because he hadn’t seen him a few days. Unbeknownst to Shmuel and Bruno, his father had already suffered the fate of the gas chamber. I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Mr. Mueller, Mr. Bomba and Ms. Farkas endured to live to tell their stories. It is hard to believe the cruelty they experienced at hands of other human beings. When faced in difficult situations, it is the survival of the fittest and I would like to think that I could be as strong in order to