As I am both an historian of the Holocaust and a certified hater, it seems fitting that my final blog post will be about a Holocaust film that I hate: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Directed by Mark Herman, the 2008 film and the 2006 novel on which it is based have become essential viewing and reading for school children learning about the Holocaust across the world. I hope the following post will be more than an exercise in nitpicking (although it will also be that) and will instead shed light on why The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not the best film in our collection for learning about the Holocaust.
Historians nitpick the historical accuracy of films set in their areas of expertise for many reasons. Historians are experts in our fields, and seeing a movie carelessly bastardize the time period we study is irritating. Sometimes, like all academics, historians can be a bit pedantic, and we tend to guard our professional prerogatives. When I watch a film set in the past, I try not to get too hung up on minor historical inaccuracies or deviations; after all, real life rarely has the narrative tightness or three-act structure of a compelling film, and filmmakers typically are not professional historians. Instead, I try to appreciate and evaluate what larger themes or ideas a period film communicates about the past. It is here that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas falls flat.
First, a brief summary of the film: Bruno, a young German boy, moves from Berlin to occupied Poland when his father is appointed commandant of a fictionalized version of Auschwitz. Although their family’s home is located near the camp, Bruno’s mother does not understand the nature of the camp or her husband’s work in it. One day, Bruno ignores his mother’s admonishment to stay away from the camp and meets a similarly-aged Jewish boy, Shmuel, at the barbed wire that separates Bruno’s family’s property and the camps. The two boys strike up an unlikely friendship, one that is shaped but not poisoned by the monstrous ideology that structures their lives. The film reaches a tragic crescendo when Bruno dons the striped uniform of camp internees and sneaks under the barbed wire to enter the camp. He and Shmuel are then rounded up and murdered in a gas chamber.
From a historical perspective, there are more than a few things wrong with this story. First, it is not remotely based on or grounded in historical fact; no non-Jewish German child, much less the child of a camp commandant, ever accidentally ended up in a gas chamber. Second, Bruno’s mother’s ignorance of the mass murder occurring in her backyard suggests a general lack of awareness on the part of Germans more broadly of the unfolding genocide, a position that historians have debunked. Imagining that the Holocaust was undertaken by a tiny sliver of German society, and that the overwhelming majority of German citizens were unaware of it, is a comforting belief, but one that is ultimately inaccurate.
However, my biggest beef with the film is its denouement, when Shmuel and Bruno are gassed, and what this turn of events communicates about the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic murder of approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children; while other groups such as the disabled, Soviet prisoners-of-war, LGBTQ people, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also targeted, European Jewry remained at the heart of the Nazi genocidal project as well as the ideology that motivated it. Bruno’s murder means that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a Holocaust story centered around the death of a German child. Undoubtedly, the filmmakers meant for Bruno’s death to pack an especially potent emotional wallop, one that reminds the viewer of the senseless suffering and destruction wrought by Nazi ideology. However, in attempting to carve out a universalist message about the horrors of the Holocaust, it loses sight of the particularity of the genocide and undercuts its own message. In the universe of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the Holocaust, like cancer or identity theft or being struck by lightning, can happen to anyone. It makes as much sense, historically and narratively, as a film about American chattel slavery whose main character is an enslaved white person, and it is just as insulting.
The question of how to represent the Holocaust in art has bedeviled artists and scholars for decades, and this blog post certainly will not put the subject to rest. Still, a few of the films in our collection approach the Holocaust with more sensitivity and precision than The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. The filmmakers behind 2015’s Son of Saul sidestep the issue of depicting mass murder by focusing the camera tightly on the face of Saul, the film’s main character and a member of the Sonderkommando tasked with disposing of the bodies of those killed by the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, also about the commandant of Auschwitz, does not visually depict the death camp; instead, the viewer only hears the sounds of genocide.
Two of the most important Holocaust films of the last three decades, Schindler’s List and The Pianist, are based on true stories, which automatically earns them legitimacy that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas lacks. It helps that both are masterpieces. Anchored by a brilliant performance by Adrian Brody, The Pianist is a true story twice over: it depicts the saga of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish musician who survives the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and it is informed by the experiences of director Roman Polanski, who escaped the Krakow Ghetto as a child. Despite being the most important American Holocaust film of all time, Schindler’s List enjoyed a great deal of controversy among scholars of the Holocaust. Like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Schindler’s List is a Holocaust story about a non-Jewish hero– in this case, the titular Schindler, a German member of the Nazi party who rescues hundreds of Polish Jews. The film has a very American feel: it is the story of a hero who fights alone against seemingly unbeatable odds. Despite its centering of a non-Jewish protagonist, along with several historical errors, Schindler’s List works because it is based on a true story and because it is expertly crafted by a director who understands and respects the Holocaust as a historical event.
Two of the most important and acclaimed films about the Holocaust eschew fictionalization entirely. Filmed surprisingly early in the history of Holocaust film, 1955’s Night and Fog blends wartime footage with haunting shots of Auschwitz and Majdanek ten years after their liberation. Night and Fog walked so Shoah could run. Shot over 11 years and released in 1985, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah avoids wartime footage and instead relies on interviews with witnesses, victims, and even perpetrators filmed in 14 countries. Appropriately, this is a challenging film: it is nine hours long. Still, a depiction of the Holocaust should not be easy, emotionally or intellectually.
The Holocaust deserves to be taken seriously, not just because of the obligation many feel we have to its victims but because the memory of it continues to play a significant role in our politics and culture. Few historical events conjure up as much emotion and outrage as the Holocaust, and few can be leveraged or distorted as powerfully for political gain. Despite its popularity in school classrooms, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas unwittingly depicts a warped version of the Holocaust, one that threatens to mislead students on the nature of the genocide.1 There are many films about the Holocaust, all of which are flawed, and none of which wholly and perfectly capture the experience of the genocide. Still, any of the films discussed in this post would be more nutritious, artistically, historically, and intellectually, than The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
The author is a certified hater and a Media Services staff member who will graduate from IU with a PhD in history in May 2025.
References
- Michael Gray, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Blessing or Curse for Holocaust Education?,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 20.3 (2014): 109-136. ↩︎
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