The boy in the striped pajamas

Recently on a bus trip from my town to Bogota, I saw the movie "The boy in the striped pajamas". For bus movie fare, it's certainly a step up from Bad Boys 2, Old Dogs, and mediocre Kevin James/Adam Sandler efforts. But I still wanted to comment on how trite and bad the film was.

The boy in the striped pajamas follows the story of an SS official's family in Nazi Germany. The official is promoted and sent (with his family) to serve as commandant of a death camp. His family is to remain within a residential compound, but his son wanders off and befriends (through an electric fence) a young boy his age interned in the camp. After various trials and travails of a German family torn between Nazi loyalty and horror at the Nazi death machine, the movie culminates with the German commandant's son entering the camp through a hole dug under the fence, dressing up as an inmate, and getting gassed with Zyklon B.

There are a number of what seem to me to be historical inaccuracies in the film, and in the end they offend me. First off, I doubt that an SS officer sent to run a death camp in a forward post like Poland (where all the death camps were) would be accompanied by his family. Secondly, I doubt that it would be so easy to dig a hole under a death camp fence that an eight-year-old boy could do it unnoticed. If it were, everyone in the camps would have escaped. I'm no expert in these things, so maybe I am mistaken my sense of how inaccurate they are. But the two things I've noted above seem pretty damn implausible.

Movies are fiction, so normally it's not a big deal if a movie has historical inaccuracies. But in this case, the creators base the entire premise of the plot on things that couldn't have been. And for what? To send a trite message that the Holocaust was bad? That the death camps dehumanized people? We already know this, and we've seen it reflected upon and treated in a million different, more artful ways than this film achieves, and without taking liberties with the facts. If you'd like good, well-informed accounts of how horrid and dehumanizing the Holocaust was for all involved, read Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel, even those Maus comic books.

Again, normally it's not too grave if a movie is inaccurate, or even trite. But the filmmakers of The boy in striped pajamas (which is based on a book written in a few days by an Irishman with apparently little sense of German language or history) took the Holocaust and used it to deliver a trite message. The millions of victims of the Holocaust (the camp inmates, the subjects living in a hellish dictatorship, the soldiers on all sides who died defending or assailing the Nazi war machine, even the architects of the Holocaust who are now surely suffering eternal torment) were and are real. The Holocaust was a real, concrete event in history that happened in a certain way, and not in any other way. To fictionalize and twist the facts of the Holocaust to deliver a filmmaker's trite message is an insult to humanity, to all of us whose present world was shaped by the Second World War (which is to say, to everyone alive today).