Essay On The Boy In The Striped Pajamas

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Based on the novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, this film portrays the life of a German child, named Bruno, throughout prewar Germany. Bruno is an eight-year old child who lives a wealthy life in Berlin along his mother, Elsa, his elder sister, Gretel, and father. Ralf, Bruno's father, is a German-soldier pertaining to the Nazis, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, who "advocated totalitarian government, territorial expansion, anti-Semitism, and Aryan supremacy, all these leading directly to World War II and the Holocaust" (Dictionary.com). Ralf is promoted and, consequently his ascension leads the entire family to move from Berlin to the countryside, where he ought to be in control of a concentration camp nearby. Bruno, with the idea of moving and, perhaps abandoning his best friends and "the best house ever" (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), felt a profound melancholy. After they arrived at the new house, Bruno looked through the window in his bedroom and saw what he called a "farm" full of farmers, for he lacked knowledge of their current situation, not knowing that the "farm" was indeed a concentration camp for the Jews. As a wandering child, Bruno is attacked by boredom and decides to go where the concentration camp is, where he …show more content…
This connects to history because Anti-Semitism, or prejudice against Jews as a race, was very common during the Holocaust, for the Nazis saw themselves as a superior race. Jews were described as "Untermenschen", meaning sub-humans. In the film, Gretel points out that Jews were the reason why the Germans had lose the Great War, and as a consequence states that Jews are evil and are not good at anything. Moreover, Herr Liszt, Bruno and Gretel's tutor, teaches both of them that Jews are the cause of their nation's collapse and that there is no such thing as a nice