Unlike your typical freshman college student, I chose to stay in and watch movies this past Saturday evening. Among the many choices on Netflix, there are only a few I haven't seen. Going through the list, my roommate suggested that The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas was "really good". So not wanting to watch Bridesmaids or Mean Girls for the 50th time like my roommate also suggested, we agreed to watch this "really good" movie.
Okay now here is my review. It was not good.
The movie was set during the beginning of the Holocaust and based around a boy, Bruno, whose family, or more partially his father, was a Nazi. Not only was he a soldier, but he seemed to be "promoted" to run a concentration camp in which the family had to move. The eight year old Bruno was very curious, and especially desperate to make friends. He went "exploring", and what he found was much more than just a friend.
To cut to the chase, Bruno made friends with another eight year old, except this boy was bound by an electric fence. Their friendship consisted of Bruno sneaking him food and the boy in "pajamas" telling him about the camp. Bruno never really understood that it wasn't just some summer camp, or that his father was the one running things.
Bruno often mentioned the horrible smells the camp let off, and he knew it was wrong how the Jews were treated as servants in his own home. Still, he was desperate to keep his friendship with Shmul and Bruno decided to sneak into the camp so they could find Shmul's father. Little did he know that once he climbed under that fence, that he was one of them. A few minutes later, you see Bruno, Shmul, and a pack of other Jews in the camp being lead to a building. Its needless to say what happened.
I was crying like a little baby.
Not only was the two boys' deaths upsetting, but throughout the whole movie, you see how Bruno's father and the other soldiers treated the Jews. I believe they even said that Jews were not human. One soldier says in reference to the smell from the camps "they smell even worse when they burn".
That ignorance literally turned my stomach. I was so disgusted with humanity, that not only at this point in time, but many times in history, there was one group of people that though they were so superior to another that they thought they had the right to treat them like animals, to treat them like they were nothing.
My heart hurts.
What is worse is that it wasn't just a movie, such events actually occurred and discrimination because people are "different' still exist today.
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