The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Brooke Wright

Professor Schneiderwind

April 22, 2015

History 1320

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas

        World War two was a time in history that the world will never forget, and certainly a time the Jewish community in Germany will never forget. It was a dark time, where Jews were being persecuted for simply being who they were born to be. A time where Germans were to be viewed as the superior race and for Jews to be looked at as peasants. The movie “The Boy In The Striped Pajamas” conveys such a deep a powerful message about the outcry Jewish people were facing during that time era by painting a picture of what it was like to be a young Jewish boy and German boy throughout the movie.

        The movie “The Boy In The Striped Pajamas” is a movie about a fictional tale of the unlikeliest of friends: the son of a Nazi commandant and a Jewish concentration camp inmate. Bruno’s family, the Nazi commanders son moves to a lonely home in Berlin that is located right by Auschwitz, one of the biggest concentration camps in Germany. After settling into their new home in berlin, Bruno decides to go exploring and comes across a big barbed wired fence where he found a young boy of the name Shmuel. Throughout the movie Bruno and Shmuel become best friends and Bruno promises him he will help him find his dad in the camp. Little did Bruno know that well beyond the barbwire fence was a deadly camp killing Jewish children and adult’s daily that his father was running. After Bruno crosses the fence, Shmuel asks him to put on a stripped jump suit to help blend in with the others so they wont get in trouble. Shortly after crossing the fence in hopes to find his dad, they end up finding themselves in the gas chambers where they meet their untimely death hand in hand.

        The movie paints a picture for viewers showing what it was like to be on the other side of the fence as a Jewish boy. The young boy in the concentration camp looked very unnourished and dirty with ripped clothing and a half smile across his face as he sat near the fence. In the article Night by Elie Wiesel, ties in well with the movie The Boy in The Striped Pajamas because he talks about the struggles he faced as a young boy who went through the concentration camp just like Shmuel faced. In Elie’s article he stats “^[1]my forehead was bathed in cold sweat. But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would ever tolerate it. “Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories.” Elie and Shmuel have something both very income since they were both two young boys who had to face what any young boy shouldn’t ever have to go through and that was the concentration camps. What Elie stated was nothing less then the truth. Being Humane wasn’t something Germans took in consideration for the Jewish and that just clearly shows just how unbarring those camps must have been.

        Although Elie Wiesel in the article Night Portrays Germans as inhuman, the movie “The Boy In The Striped Pajamas” views Germans in a different light showing that maybe not all Germans are so bad after all. I love how that the movie shows the great bond the young German boy had with the Jewish prisoner. It shows that the moral of the story was that no matter what the color of a person’s skin or their religion, no one deserves to be discriminated or treated differently. The author of the movies shows how the young German boy did just that, and treated the Jewish boy how he would treat anyone else. Bruno didn’t treat him any differently because there wasn’t any reason to treat him differently from all his German friends because he wasn’t taught yet to look down on others. If Bruno was raised to look a Jews and turn his head, then maybe the moral of the story would changed because that was something that almost all Germans did to Jews, due to the government sentencing that act to happen and if you did not agree, you were to be viewed as a peasant like the Jewish community in Europe.