WRITING CULTURE 2012: Film, Food & Beyond

“The Boy in The Striped Pajamas”- youll love it even if you are not into history or war.

What happens when a country finds itself to be ruled by a fanatic, a sick person? Not only its citizens are afraid to say no to follow the orders of the presidents, but a number of people die, a huge number of people die. 3 million Jews died in concentration camps in the time of Holocaust, 3 million people is a lot of people, just imagine, say, Jamaica to be erased from the map (and the population of Jamaica is 2.7 million- even less than 3 million). These are only Jews that were killed, there were millions of people of other nations destroyed.This war set a huge seal in the history of my country (I am Russian), my country still feels the traces of war in its demographics. There were at least one person taken away from an average Russian family by this war.

I love watching movies about World War the second, movies about concentration camps in particular. There were so many books written and films shot, not all of them are good, but some of them, once seen, will stay in your mind forever, and one of them is “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”.

This move is about how Nazis son, going for a walk, comes to the wire of the concentration camp where his daddy burns people works. He meets another boy , same age, who (just like this boy) likes to play and is playing next to the wire. The two boys become friends, and the Jewish kid invites him over to play with him in the camp, gives him the striped pajamas so that he was not noticed, after what the kids are taken to one of the gas rooms and both die with hundreds of other people.

The scary part is that for the boys the pajamas is just some weird type of clothes that you have to wear all the time and the wire shows your territory, when for the grown-ups it is an indication of the fact that a person needs to be slaughtered just for being Jewish or Russian or gypsy (or for not having the Aryan blood) and the wire keeps them in their little cell. The boy could easily run away, he came outside the wire to play with his friend, but he sees his life there as something not dangerous at all, his little mind just does not know yet that people can be so cruel and can kill for nothing. The other boy sees this little Jewish boy as any other person to play with, he does not know what Jew means yet, he does not see the difference between them.

This kind of movies (historical drama, holocaust movie) is the most interesting to me. Watching these movies is just like being immersed into the past, sometimes horrible past thus letting all the events go through yourself and understanding the history a little bit more. Another movie, which is one of my favorites, is “The Pianist”. It tells us about a very talented Jewish pianist hiding in Nazi Germany from being taken to the concentration camp. Another movie which is on the list of the movies I have to watch is “The Schindlers List”.

http://blogs.woodtv.com/2008/11/21/review-boy-in-the-striped-pajamas-is-sad-and-poignant/