The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
My wife and I went to see this film this afternoon. It is emotionally overwhelming--but I confess that I had some doubts about how plausible it was. At least at some work camps, young children were immediately gassed, because their labor wasn't considered worth feeding them. There were children almost as young as the boy in the striped pajamas in some concentration camps, it is true, but I don't get the impression that this was at all common. There are problems with the lack of patrols around the fence, and the sheer unlikeliness of what happens at the end of the movie.
Still, it might be the only awareness that most young people will ever have of the Holocaust, since the left seems to prefer that kids get out of school with almost no awareness of it. Language is not a problem. The PG-13 is only because the subject matter--mass murder--is the greatest obscenity that one can imagine. It is also more subtle than I have would expected in its portrayal of the complex problems of growing up in a society where every significant instrument of government and the media were propagandizing in favor or barbarism. On the other hand, there just too many German characters prepared to voice their opposition (or at least bite their tongue) to a system that enjoyed overwhelming support from Germans until almost the end.
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