Sie sind auf Seite 1von 4

Dyna Rose L.

Panizales BEED ELGEN B

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas


INTRODUCTION

The novel begins in Germany in the 1940s, set during World War II. A story seen
through the innocent eyes of an eight-year-old boy living in Berlin, Germany in 1943, and
a son of the Commandant in the German army during World War II, under the regime of
the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler.

In the movie, Bruno comes home from school to find the maid, Maria, packing his
things because the family is moving away from Berlin. Bruno's not happy about it but
Bruno's out of luck; his father just got a promotion and they're moving on up, whether he
wants to or not.

“Out-With,” where Bruno and his family move, is Bruno’s word for “Auschwitz,” a
concentration camp in German-annexed Poland where Jews were imprisoned and
murdered during the war. The German Nazi Party, which operated on an Anti-Semitic
rhetoric, used these camps to kill six million Jews between 1942 and 1945 (as well as
almost five million non-Jewish people, including homosexuals, Romani people, and the
mentally disabled). Auschwitz was one of the deadliest and most infamous of these
camps. The Allies liberated the prisoners of the camps towards the end of the war,
between 1944 and 1945.
DISCUSSION

In the movie, which is a fictional “fable” of the Holocaust, features Bruno as the
narrator. During World War II, the Nazi Party, which gained control of Germany, operated
on the idea that ethnic Germans were superior to the rest of the world, particularly the
Jewish population in Europe at the time. Nazi rhetoric and propaganda operated heavily
on the idea of the “other”—emphasizing an “us vs. them” division, and demonizing and
dehumanizing “them.” In practice this meant attempting to prove, using pseudoscience,
the Bible, nationalism, and scare tactics, that Jews were an inferior race that needed to
be “exterminated” to solve Germany’s problems.

Bruno, though he attends school, is mostly ignorant of the political situation at the
time. Bruno has little to no idea as to what is going on in the camp, or in Germany as a
whole. He thinks that Shmuel, the identically-aged Jewish boy whom he befriends through
the fence to the concentration camp, lives there with his family voluntarily, and Bruno
never understands exactly why Shmuel is there, or why he is so thin. Little did he know,
the camp full of people in “striped pajamas”—the Jews and other prisoners brought to the
camp are to work or be killed.

Family and friendship are both important themes for Bruno, as he struggles to
determine what role he plays in his household, and how to approach his friendship
with Shmuel. Bruno has not been indoctrinated with a hatred for Jews, despite the fact
that his father is high-ranking Nazi officer, but his parents do stress that he is not allowed
to go near the fence, and his father refers to the people in the “striped pajamas” as “not
really people at all.”

In the film, Bruno putting on the striped “pajamas” and entering into Shmuel’s
world, a world that is abnormal to Bruno but normal for Shmuel. What defines normal?
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, normal is “conforming to a type, standard,
or regular pattern”. Based on this definition, Bruno’s father’s actions were normal because
he conformed to the standard set by the Nazi regime. Also, the father perceived his
actions as appropriate and normal. Therefore, normal is also defined (and possibly
limited) by our perceptions of the world in which we live.
Life and our perception of it stems from the prism of our own expectations. Bruno
expected every little boy to be free to run and play just as he did. Therefore, when he
interacted with Shmuel, he perceived Shmuel’s life to be abnormal and attempted to
normalize it by fitting it into his prism of expectations.

CONCLUSION

The message of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is that we are all more alike than
we are different. The innocent friendship of the Jewish boy Shmuel and the Nazi's son
Bruno, set against the horrific backdrop of the Holocaust, highlights the fact that divisions
between people are arbitrary. By telling the story of Bruno and Shumel’s friendship, it
encourages us to see others through the eyes of a child, because children are innocent
and unaware of racism, sexism, and other biases that separate people from one another.

Ultimately, the message of the story is that beneath it all, we are all the same.
Regardless of our color, religious preferences, sexual preferences, or gender, we are all
the same and should be judged the same.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen