By Abraham H. FoxmanNational Director of the Anti-Defamation League
Posted: December 9, 2008
As time moves us farther and farther away from World War II, we are challenged by the need to keep new generations informed about the Holocaust its uniqueness and its lessons for the current times. One way is through film dramatizations.
"The Boy in Striped Pajamas" is a powerful and complex movie. Its ending is devastating, but the power of the movie does not lie solely in the memorable conclusion. Throughout, it provokes strong and complicated emotions.
It is a story about a German family during World War II. The father is a Nazi official who is transferred from Berlin to be a commandant at a concentration camp. His wife is a complex figure who at times expresses discomfort with what her husband is doing. Her mother is an anti-Nazi German. The couple has two children, a teenage daughter who is devoted to the father and his Nazism, and an 8-year-old boy who just wants to be an 8-year-old boy. The family dynamic reflects the dominance of the Nazi ideology in society but speaks as well to the fissures in that dominance.
The film forces the viewer to confront some basic and raw emotions. Is it possible to sympathize with individuals in a family of a concentration camp commandant? By doing so, is one giving, however unintended, some legitimacy to the whole sordid enterprise? Is it appropriate to think about moral complexity in the face of the greatest evil imaginable? And, is it possible, as the horror of the Holocaust evolves, to think not simply of evil Nazis and innocent Jews, but of people simply being people?
The title of the movie refers to an 8-year-old Jewish camp inmate who is befriended by the young German boy at a fence bordering the camp on one side and the home of the commandant on the other. The poignancy of the relationship between the two boys inevitably leads one to ask whether hatred is inevitable. Despite their very different situations, the boys see each other as natural friends rather than as enemies. Yet one is also aware that once the German boy is indoctrinated in his father's ideology, those mutual feelings will disintegrate and dominance and oppression will rule.
The d�nouement of the movie (which I won't give away) is tragic but also an effort to make time stand still, to keep the relationship between the boys as it was rather than as it would become.
As a Holocaust survivor and the head of an organization whose mission is to combat hate, I can say the film touches on the variety of hate's manifestations and reactions to them. It depicts people standing up against a frenzy of hatred even when they lose such a struggle. It shows that hatred is not a natural phenomenon for young people; as the song from "South Pacific" says "You've got to be taught to hate and fear." And it suggests that when hate is abroad in the land, no one is immune from its consequences, even those who may think they are.
"The Boy in Striped Pajamas" makes one think about moral issues. It forces the viewer to examine his or her conflicting drives, whether to "understand" that life is always complex even when good and evil are starkly apparent, or to deny complexity and sympathy as inappropriate responses to the worst kind of inhumanity.
Finally, the film reminds us of the consequences of hatred, first, of course, for the victims but for the oppressors as well.