JACK SCANLON
We watched “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” a 2008 film based on John Boyne’s novel for young adults.
This movie is most effective at portraying people who can rationalize almost any behavior on the grounds that it is their duty to some entity that they perceive as being larger and more important than any individual. One doesn’t have to look too far to find places to apply this model.
The story has to do with an eight-year-old boy, Bruno, played by Asa Butterfield, whose father is a highly placed officer in the German army during World War II. The boy and his teenaged sister admire their father’s stature without thinking about the nature of the regime that gave it to him. As the movie opens, the father, played by David Thewlis, informs his family that he has a new assignment that will force them to leave their opulent house in Berlin and move to “the country.” The “country” home turns out to be a stark mansion located within eyeshot of a concentration camp – a fact the father tries to hide from his children, and particularly Bruno.
ASA BUTTERFIELD
But Bruno, being an eight-year-old boy with fantasies about exploring, is curious about what he thinks is a farm beyond the barbed-wire fence he first sees from the window of his room. Disregarding his mother’s instructions, he wanders through the woods until he reaches the fence, and there he makes friends with one of the inmates, Shmuel. Shmuel, also eight years old, disabuses Bruno of the idea that the camp is a farm, but Shmuel does not understand why he and his family are in the camp or why some of his relatives go off with “work crews” and never return. What Bruno does gradually learn is that he is supposed to hate Jews, but that Shmuel, a Jew, does not seem to him an enemy. One can’t discuss the outcome of their friendship without spoiling the experience of seeing this film for the first time.
DAVID THEWLIS
Appreciating this film requires some suspension of credibility. We are to believe, for example, that Bruno’s mother does not know until she has moved to “the country” and lived there for some time exactly what takes place in the camp her husband oversees – that Jews and presumably others who were distasteful to the Nazis are gassed and their bodies incinerated. We are also to believe that Bruno and Shmuel can carry on a friendship through the camp fence, meeting there daily in broad daylight, even playing checkers, without being discovered.
Despite those issues, this movie delivers its message with a wallop. Thewlis, and Vera Farmiga as the mother, give chilling portrayals of the impact Naziism had on the inner selves of individual men and women. Both boys are also very effective in their roles; Jack Scanlon is a heartbreaker.
“… if ever I forget thee …”
April 19, 2009
The New York Times today reports on a Holocaust museum that has been established in Skokie, Ill. Skokie became the home of many survivors of the Holocaust, and 32 years ago it was chosen for that reason as the site of a march by a group of neo-Nazis. The Nazis’ plan and the opposition to it set off a debate on free speech. The march never took place, but the hubris of the Nazis inspired Holocaust survivors to be more open about what had happened to them and their families, and that change led to establishment of the museum.
The times reports that “unlike similar institutions, the Skokie museum is almost totally anchored in the local, brought to life with the personal pictures, documents, clothing, testimonies and other artifacts of the building’s own neighbors. And several of the Holocaust survivors are working as docents and other staff members, weaving their first-person stories into the history, exploring issues of genocide around the world.”
That’s a powerful and important concept and one that could be emulated, even if needs be on a smaller scale, in other towns and cities where there are still people left to tell this story first hand. That’s true not only because there will always be those who deny – contrary to the indisputable evidence – that the Holocaust took place, and because even those who acknowledge the Holocaust should be reminded of it – both the fact of it and its enduring impact on families all over the world. Historical epochs are like that; they don’t end on any given day but continue indefinitely to affect the lives of succeeding generations – as the era of American slavery directly affects millions of people living today.
The Times also published an account today of a relatively new body of research on some of the lesser-known Nazi “killing fields.” It’s at this site:
“… when mercy seasons justice …”
April 5, 2009
JOHN DEMJANUJK
The Los Angeles Times had a video on its site in which the son of a man accused of participating in the deaths of thousands of people in a Nazi concentration camp, argues both that his father, John Demjanjuk, is innocent and that his father – now 89 and frail – should not be extradited. A U.S. immigration judge on Friday issued an indefinite stay of deportation based on the Demjanjuk family’s claim that making the elderly man travel from Cleveland to Germany for trial would be tantamount to torture. The stay will continue until the judge rules on the merits of the claim.
Demjanjuk has already been convicted of lying to authorities about his past as a Nazi guard, but his conviction under a charge that he was the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka death camp was overturned based on evidence that identified another man as that guard.
Now he is charged with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder at the Sorbibo concentration camp in Poland.
On the face of it, one might say that, inasmuch as he lied about his past in order to become an American citizen, it’s tough luck for Demjanjuk if travel would be hard on him or even kill him. However, modern technology makes it unnecessary for Demjanjuk to be in Germany for the trial; he could attend through closed-circuit television or a secure webcast. Also, in spite of what is already known about his past, American justice can be true to itself only by granting him the presumption of innocence on the charges at issue. If he is sent to Germany for trial and is acquitted, and dies prematurely because he was forced to attend in person, that would be one more injustice piled on all the other unrequited injustices of the past.
JOHN DEMJANJUK
If Demjanjuk is convicted of the charges against him, he should be deported to submit to whatever sentence is imposed on him – old or not, sick or not. Both the enormity of the crimes of the Holocaust and the fact that the roots of such crimes still exist among white supremacists and anti-Semites require that everyone who participated be brought to justice. But another suitable response to such crimes, especially when guilt has not yet been determined, is to act with the quality of mercy that was absent from the Nazi mind, a quality that is the antithesis of Nazi thinking.
“Never again”?
February 28, 2009
Uber alles
February 14, 2009
As though the economy weren’t enough to worry about, Germany is involved in a controversy over re-publication of news stories from the period of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. If I understand this correctly, the Allied Powers gave the copyright of much of this material to the State of Bavaria, and Bavaria does not grant permission to republish it. But a British publisher decided to ignore the copyright issue and distribute a collection of articles, including an account of the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the incident that gave Hitler the excuse he needed to assume dictatorial powers. We all know how that worked out.
Agents of the German government is going around seizing copies of the second weekly edition of the reprints, but 250,000 copies of the first issue have been sold already. One complaint the government has is that the first issue included a Nazi poster in which a large swastika was visible. Images of the swastika have been prohibited in Germany since the end of World War II. Another complaint is that the articles are not accompanied by any commentary that might be helpful for those who do not know the legacy of National Socialism.
The broader rationale for stifling these reproductions is that neo-Nazis could use them to further their goals.
Poor people. Poor, poor people who carry such a burden and try to make it lighter by surrendering their fundamental rights. Poor people who forget or never knew the “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” and its blazing festival in May 1933 – 25,000 books burned in one day, more than a quarter of a million burned before the Thousand Year Reich came to a premature end, all to “purify” the Fatherland and rid it of “Jewish intellectualism.”
“The future German man will not be a man just of books,” Joseph Goebbels told a mob of students at the May bonfire, “but a man of character.”
Or perhaps, Germany would rather forget that too.
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