Outside Movie

Robbie Heath

I recently watched an intriguing movie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This movie looked at an issue that has been tackled repeatedly in movies of our time. That issue is the Holocaust of the second world war. However, in this movie we gain a new perspective from the view of a child. In the movie a young boy who is the son of a German concentration camp officer accidentally finds the nearby camp after explores the woods behind his house. There he sees and gets to know through the fence a young Jewish boy in the camp. They become good friends as the young German boy does not understand what is going on. At the end of the movie the German boy sneaks into the camp to be with his friend because he is lonely. Ironically he ends up being taken into the "showers" where he is massacred with the Jews in the camp. The interesting commentary in this movie comes with the great hypocrisy that is seen. It is not the large picture of what the Germans did, but the individuals. At the end the viewer watches as the boys father rushes to the camp only finding that he is too late and his son has been killed by the tools of destruction that he has been supporting. This man acted like a good family man at home while being a murderer at work. The filmmaker clearly shows how men cannot live with such hypocrisies.