Historical Inaccuracies: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a novel by John Boyne, it is from the point of view of a nine year old called Bruno growing up in World War 2 . He lived in Berlin, Germany with his parents and his sister, Gretel. His father is promoted to Commandant and his family moves to a place called Auschwitz. Bruno is lonely in Auschwitz, Bruno notices from his window what he believes to be a farm, little does he know that it is a concentration camp. Bruno displays very naive and innocent characteristics, he does not understand what is going on around him. Throughout this book there are many historical inaccuracies, after finding these flaws in the book it made the book very frustrating to read!
One of the historical inaccuracies that I discovered was that Bruno was overly naive and innocent for an educated German boy at this time. An educated German student would’ve understood what was going on at the time, Bruno would’ve been taught that Jews are awful creatures and the...
Common themes are discovered throughout the book and movie. They both share the theme of bravery, but in different ways. Wiesel shows bravery by surviving death marches, concentration camps, starvation, and just everyday life. Bruno shows bravery by going to visit Shmuel everyday and by breaking into the camp to help Shmuel find his father. In the end, both boys got different fates, Wiesel was freed and went on to become successful, but Bruno died in a gas chamber while performing the heroic act of trying to help Shmuel find his father. Those are the reasons why Night and The Boy in Striped Pajamas relate to each
“Der Ewige Jude” was engineered by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda.It was created to legitimize the exclusion, and the ultimately the destruction, of an entire people. It depicts the Jews of Poland as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse: they are an alien people which have taken over the world through their control of banking and commerce, yet which still live like animals. The narra...
In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, a young naive boy, Bruno, tells from his perspective how the occurrences in the Holocaust took place. In 1943, the beginning of the story, Bruno’s father, a commandant in Hitler’s army, is promoted and moves to Oswiecim with his family. Oswiecim is home to the hideous Auschwitz Concentration Camp. While Bruno is out playing near a fence at the edge of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, against his father’s orders, he becomes friends with a young Jewis...
When Bruno moved to Auschwitz he was completely oblivious to the Holocaust. When he met Shmuel, he became slightly more aware, but couldn’t comprehend what it all meant. It is ironic that his innocence sheltered him from the traumatizing truth of the Holocaust, but it is what killed him in the
...he So-Called Mischlinge.” The Holocaust and History. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 155-133.
A story of a young boy and his father as they are stolen from their home in Transylvania and taken through the most brutal event in human history describes the setting. This boy not only survived the tragedy, but went on to produce literature, in order to better educate society on the truth of the Holocaust. In Night, the author, Elie Wiesel, uses imagery, diction, and foreshadowing to describe and define the inhumanity he experienced during the Holocaust.
Boyne, John. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. New York: Random House Inc., 2006. Print.
This book takes place during World War II in Hungarian Transylvania and in different concentration camps. The story begins at Eliezer’s home which is an apartment in a town called Sighet. Other settings in the book are the different concentration camps where Eliezer and his father are prisoners. In every location, Eliezer learns how to survive and grows more into a man.
This film portrays one of humanity’s greatest modern tragedies, through heartache and transgression, reflecting various themes throughout the movie. Beyond the minor themes some seem to argue as more important in the film, the theme of friendship and love is widely signified and found to be fundamental in understanding the true meaning behind The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Director Mark Herman presents a narrative film that attests to the brutal, thought-provoking Nazi regime, in war-torn Europe. It is obvious that with Herman’s relatively clean representation of this era, he felt it was most important to resonate with the audience in a profound and philosophical manner rather than in a ruthlessly infuriating way. Despite scenes that are more graphic than others, the film's objective was not to recap on the awful brutality that took place in camps such as the one in the movie.
Bruno is a 9 year old boy growing up in a loving, but typically authoritarian German family in the 1930?s. His father is a senior military officer who was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz? a promotion that requires upheaval from their comfortable home in Berlin to an austere home in the Polish countryside. The story explores Bruno?s difficulty in accepting and adapting to this change - especially the loss of his friends and grandparents. Boyne gives personality and family to the sort of person who today is generally demonised by western writings - the people who administered and controlled the death camps in which over 6 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others were deemed to be grossly inferior by Hitler and his cohorts.
Bruno, an eight year old boy at the time of the war, is completely oblivious to the atrocities of the war around him - even with a father who is a Nazi commandant. The title of the book is evidence to this - Bruno perceives the concentration camp uniforms as "striped pajamas." Further evidence is the misnomers "the Fury," (the Furher) and "Out-With" (Auschwitz). Bruno and Shmuel, the boy he meets from Auschwitz, share a great deal in common but perhaps what is most striking is the childhood innocence which characterizes both boys. Bruno is unaware that his father is a Nazi commandant and that his home is on ther periphery of Auschwitz. Shmuel, imprisoned in the camp, seems not to understand the severity of his situation. When his father goes missing, Shmuel does not understand that he has gone to the gas chamber.
In her report of Nazi SS member Adolph Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, first published as a series of articles in The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt managed to spark great controversy, both in the academy and among the general public. The primary attack on Arendt was that she seemed to “blame the victim”, in this case the Jews, for their role in their own extermination during the Holocaust. While by no means the focus of her book, this perceived accusation in combination with her portrayal of Eichmann as an apparently sane, ordinary man made readers uncomfortable at best and at worst vindictive and unforgiving in their critique. In assuming the objective, detached role she did, she risked ostracizing herself from both friends and colleagues as well as the Jewish community as a whole. That Arendt could insist Eichmann lacked the evil qualities he was accused of possessing, and was not the sadistic, inhuman monster the prosecution and everyone else wanted him to be was inconceivable. On the contrary, Arendt was disturbed by Eichmann, but instead by his obvious mediocrity. Were he the monster that he was expected to be, one could have easily judged and separated oneself from him, taking pride in the striking contrast between one and the accused. Instead, people were faced with a supposedly “evil” man who was, for the most part, not significantly different from the average man. It would go against the common sense of most to consider a man who facilitated such a great number of deaths “normal.” While commonplace in some ways, he represents a failed product of humanity; more specifically, he is an existential failure. The appearance of normalcy merely comes from how smoothly and effortlessly one can slip into that role. Eichmann proves himse...
He never really knew why Shmuel was on the other side of the fence. In the book, Bruno asked his sister, Gretel, “‘Are we Jews?’” (Boyne 182). This shows that Bruno had very little knowledge of what was really happening in Auschwitz and all around the world. Boyne had also made Bruno use a very shameful and inappropriate term in his book.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, by John Boyne, significantly distorts the truth of the Holocaust in order to evoke the empathy of the audience. This response is accomplished by the author through hyperbolizing the innocence of the nine-year old protagonist, Bruno. Through the use of dramatic irony, Boyne is able to both engage and involve the audience in the events of the novel. Although it is highly improbable that a son of a German high-ranking Schutzstaffel (SS) officer would not know what a Jew is and would be unable to pronounce both Fuhrer and Auschwitz, (which he instead mispronounces as ‘Fury’ and ‘Out-with’ respectively, both of which are intentional emotive puns placed by the author to emphasize the atrocity of the events), the attribution of such information demonstrates the exaggerated innocence of Bruno and allows the audience to know and understand more than him. This permits the readers to perceive a sense of involvement, thus, allowing the audience to be subjected towards feeling more dynamic and vigorous evocation of emotions and empathy towards the characters. Fu...
Imagine waking up on a normal day, in your normal house, in your normal room. Imagine if you knew that that day, you would be taken away from your normal life, and forced to a life of death, sickness, and violence. Imagine seeing your parents taken away from you. Imagine watching your family walk into their certain death. Imagine being a survivor. Just think of the nightmares that linger in your mind. You are stuck with emotional pain gnawing at your sanity. These scenerios are just some of the horrific things that went on between 1933-1945, the time of the Holocaust. This tragic and terrifying event has been written about many times. However, this is about one particularly fascinating story called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne.