You Know... For Kids

September 12, 2008 3:36 AM

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: "You're never too young to learn about the idiocy of racism and the folly of prejudice."

RT: 100% | John Boyne | Blog

posted by chuckdarwin (30 comments total)

Directed by Mark Herman:

Hope Springs (2003)
Purely Belter (2000)
Little Voice (1998)
Brassed Off (1996)
Blame It on the Bellboy (1992)
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:38 AM on September 12, 2008

Thanks for spoiling this for everyone. How the fuck can I watch this movie now that I know that the "Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is actually - A GIRL!?

Yes, 12 year-old Polly Pooperstrasse runs away from home to join the circus. But when she presents herself to Dr. Isosceles' Carnival of Unusuality, she's in for the surprise of her life!

Polly becomes the latest addition to the House of Freaks, playing a pubescent boy whose continual masturbation has glued his pajamas permanently to his body.

The fiesty little androgenite soon becomes the toast of the Berlin circus circuit, all the while learning valuable life lessons from her friends, the other performing misfits - the Bearded Clam-man, Lady Octopus, Lil' Bigboy and Das Kumkwat.

Together they hatch a plan to form their OWN touring company, and give the tyrannical Dr. Isosceles a long-overdue come-uppance. Unfortunately, they are all murdered by Nazis in the final scene. A chucklefest for the whole family: five stars.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 4:33 AM on September 12, 2008 [9 favorites has favorites]

Favourited simply for the word 'chucklefest'.
posted by chuckdarwin at 4:37 AM on September 12, 2008

Dunno if I'd fancy trying to answer the questions this film would prompt a ten year old to ask, to be honest.

Also, it's interesting that the BBFC gave this a 12A, but chose to lumber the excellent This Is England with a 15 - seems to me that if younger kids can cope with a concentration camp drama, they can cope with a drama set amongst a skinhead gang in the '80s. (Sorry, slightly off-topic that, but both films carry a strong anti-racism message, both feature children as central characters, both are intended in part as educational.)
posted by jack_mo at 4:47 AM on September 12, 2008

Dunno if I'd fancy trying to answer the questions this film would prompt a ten year old to ask, to be honest.

I think it's ok to tell a child that grown-ups don't always know the answers.
posted by chillmost at 4:52 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

You know who else didn't always know the answers?
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 5:38 AM on September 12, 2008 [5 favorites has favorites]

jack_mo - the Holocaust is a compulsory part of the national curriculum. It's quite likely 12-year-olds know about it already.
posted by athenian at 6:04 AM on September 12, 2008

Wait, wait - the Nazis were British?

I thought it was some weird child fantasy movie where a boy sent from London to avoid the Blitz dicovers a concentration camp in his own pastoral backyard.

What ever happened to fake German accents?
posted by Paid In Full at 6:28 AM on September 12, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

Can someone with more knowledge about the Holocaust than I explain how this story line is even remotely plausible? Unless we're talking about some kind of Schindler's List scenario, how could a child this young make it past the "selection" to be an inmate?
posted by foxy_hedgehog at 6:34 AM on September 12, 2008

The worst part of the Holocaust Museum, to me, was the children's artwork display--crudely-drawn pictures like any child would draw, but by children in concentration camps, children who likely were gassed or starved to death at some point. So, yeah, there were kids in there, at least at some point.
posted by MrMoonPie at 6:58 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Can someone with more knowledge about the Holocaust than I explain how this story line is even remotely plausible? Unless we're talking about some kind of Schindler's List scenario, how could a child this young make it past the "selection" to be an inmate?

It sounds like the camp the child is in is a work camp, rather than an extermination camp. Most camps started out this way -- the Jews who were in them were pressed into forced labor and generally mistreated, but, until later in the war, were treated with a pretense that they were prisoners of war. So children weren't simply separated and murdered, not until later.

There were a lot of children in concentration camps. I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a collection of their poems.
posted by Astro Zombie at 7:00 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

how could a child this young make it past the "selection" to be an inmate?

Roma (Gypsy) and Jewish children, the first to be placed in any Nazi concentration camp, arrived at Ravensbrück in 1939. Though the statistics on the number of children in the camp are incomplete, hundreds were imprisoned and died in the camp. Many of the Roma children were subjected to sadistic “medical” experiments or were sterilized. With little food, unsanitary conditions and heavy forced labour, only a few of the strongest children survived. The women prisoners secretly made clothes for the children, because the camp clothes were too big. Often a special and close relationship developed between the motherless children and the women. These “camp mothers” cared for and did what they could to save “their camp children”. [1]

posted by stbalbach at 7:05 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

foxy_hedgehog: Here's a link from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum about the killing of children during the Holocaust:

The fate of Jewish and non-Jewish children can be categorized in the following way: 1) children killed when they arrived in killing centers; 2) children killed immediately after birth or in institutions; 3) children born in ghettos and camps who survived because prisoners hid them; 4) children, usually over age 12, who were used as laborers and as subjects of medical experiments; and 5) those children killed during reprisal operations or so-called anti-partisan operations.

...

The German authorities also incarcerated a number of children in concentration camps and transit camps. SS physicians and medical researchers used a number of children, including twins, in concentration camps for medical experiments that often resulted in the deaths of the children... The German authorities held other children under appalling conditions in transit camps, such as the case of Anne Frank and her sister in Bergen-Belsen, and non-Jewish orphaned children whose parents the German military and police units had killed in so-called anti-partisan operations.

As far as the Nazis were concerned, they were undesirable first, and children a very distant second. So it's quite plausible, if monumentally depressing.
posted by Jilder at 7:05 AM on September 12, 2008

There were a lot of children in concentration camps. I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a collection of their poems.

For the record, the children who wrote I Never Saw Another Butterfly were at the Terezin camp, which worked a BIT differently -- it was sort of the "show camp" for a time, the place where people were given halfway-decent food and allowed to engage in recreation so the Nazis could trot the Red Cross through and say "see? We are treating people well, as you can see in this randomly-selected representation of a typical camp that is in no way different from any of the other camps we assure you." I mean, it still was an awful place, but the Nazis conducted affairs there a bit more subtly and were a bit less quick to exterminate people.

Tangent: I attended a production of I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY about 6 years ago and sat next to an elderly couple. The man gave a funny kind of laugh in the middle of Act I when he heard the children in the show singing a particular song, and had some other odd reactions to some of the details. It wasn't until intermission that I overheard his conversation with his wife and learned that that odd laugh he gave was because he had REMEMBERED that song from having sung it in TEREZIN HIMSELF when he was a boy. Yow.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:25 AM on September 12, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

The figure usually given is that one million children wee slaughtered. In the brief sequence here depicted, the two youngsters playing checkers instantly reminded me that to go "to the wire" meant you either got shot immediately or electrocuted by the wire (which some inmates did as a way of sucide). If you do research, you will also discover that some young childen were used as houseboys, servants, but sexually abused too ...and then killed off.
if interested, http://www.wsg-hist.uni-linz.ac.at/AUSCHWITZ/HTML/Kinder-II.html
and
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/children.html
posted by Postroad at 7:33 AM on September 12, 2008

I've been to Terezin. I've been to Mauthausen (in Austria). Show camp or no, if you are the least bit sensitive to (mmm...how to say it so I don't sound like a nutter? "bad energy"?), you will walk out of any of those camps feeling like you got punched in the solar plexus. Just from walking on the grounds.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 7:47 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Great; when a trailer makes you cry, what the hell will the feature do?
posted by Mike D at 7:52 AM on September 12, 2008

I made the mistake of ordering a pizza and sitting down to watch Schindler's List. It arrived about the time the children were all diving into the outhouses to hide.

I think I'll be skipping this one even though it has David Thewlis in it (one of my favorite underrated actors). The Holocaust is depressing enough. No need to see it through the "eyes of a child."

My favorite Holocaust spoof. (I can't believe I just wrote that last line and meant it). Brought to you by The Onion.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:53 AM on September 12, 2008

You're never too young to learn about the idiocy of racism and the folly of prejudice.

A lot of kids are too young to grasp abstract concepts like racism and prejudice and their subtle effects on the world though. Films like this do a good job of teaching young children that Nazis and concentration camps are bad, but they might not necessarily be able to connect that to the fact that some students in their class makes fun of the one kid who looks different than everyone else.

In my opinion a lot of the material given to young children to teach them about racism is too unrelatable because they only focus on obvious human rights violations like the Holocaust or slavery, and don't focus on more insidious and common forms of racism. Oddly enough I think the book that confronts prejudice in the simplest and most relatable way possible is The Sneeches from Dr. Suess.
posted by burnmp3s at 7:55 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

We just started screening it today that the cinema I manage and no children so far have come to see it although there were a couple of mothers who came to ask if the 12A certificate meant that they could bring their children aged under 12 to see it. I told them that yes they could but that I'd advise against it given the eventual fate of Bruno and Shmuel.

But if the child has read the book already then seeing the film might not be so disturbing as they would know what to expect from it.
posted by electricinca at 9:05 AM on September 12, 2008

Also, it's interesting that the BBFC gave this a 12A, but chose to lumber the excellent This Is England with a 15.

Actually This Is England was given an 18 certificate due to the very strong racist violence and language.
posted by electricinca at 9:11 AM on September 12, 2008

In my opinion a lot of the material given to young children to teach them about racism is too unrelatable because they only focus on obvious human rights violations like the Holocaust or slavery, and don't focus on more insidious and common forms of racism. Oddly enough I think the book that confronts prejudice in the simplest and most relatable way possible is The Sneeches from Dr. Suess.
posted by burnmp3s at 10:55 AM on September 12 [1 favorite +] [!]

Actually, history made much more of an impression on me as a child. I remember reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a novel about segregation and racism, when I was about 8 or 9, and that meant so much more to me than any of the metaphorical stories of racism I had been exposed to before then. This was because the characters were realistic, and relatable; they were like me, and I was fully in their shoes through their experiences. Maybe imaginary creatures are fine for pre-school children, but for older children a realistic story will hit home much harder.
posted by jb at 9:38 AM on September 12, 2008

I dunno if anyone else out there is old enough to remember The World at War.

It was a documentary TV series that was screened in the mid 60's in the UK, every Sunday Afternoon at around teatime, for twenty six weeks, and as there were only two channels and it was a major media event, pretty well every household watched. Remember, it was only twenty years since the war ended, so the events were still pretty fresh for the adult viewers.

But I can still clearly remember watching the newsreel footage of nazis shovelling the naked bodies of jews into mass graves, and the painfully emaciated faces and bodies of the people in the camps as they were liberated. I suppose I might have been nine or ten at the time? Was it Susan Sontag who says that we divide our lives up into those periods before we learned about he holocaust, and then afterwards?

As the man said: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:58 AM on September 12, 2008

bitter-girl - I went on a tour of Dachau, and I know exactly the feeling you're describing. I left there shaky and feeling ill, and there was nothing left but a few 'exhibits'.
posted by sandraregina at 10:16 AM on September 12, 2008

When I was a youngster of 6, I had no idea what racism was, except that I gathered it was bad- My folks would go on and on about "I judge people by their actions" and "I have a lot of black friends". I only knew that there were nice people and mean people. One day, I was playing in the yard with two new friends, and we were having a great time making up games and imagining all kinds of silliness. After my friends left, My dad said, "Don't bring that black kid over here any more, he smells bad. They all do."

I sat by myself and thought it over. Finally, I realized that no one wanted to be called a racist, because that was a bad thing to be. But neither did most anyone want to change their racist thinking or challenge their backward tribalist preconceptions. They just talked a little less loud about it, or made sure to only reveal their true feelings in "like minded" company. At least, I thought, it was just broken poor people like my parents that succumbed to such stuff.



Flash forward to July of 1993. My wife and I were staying at her mother's house in upper-crust suburban Philadelphia. Her mom was Jewish, but didn't much practice, and neither did my wife. An old schoolmate of hers, who'd been studying at Yeshiva in Israel, came by to visit. He walked in, greeted her warmly, took one look at me, and said archly, "So, this is the goy that you're selling out your heritage with. Hope you're proud of yourself."

I was 6 for a long moment. I had been thinking my whole life that if people just knew how devastating prejudice, racism, and tribalism were, if they'd felt it themselves, if they'd been educated about what hate can do, that there was no way they could succumb to it.

That was a lesson I have not since forgotten, and in my dealings with the world from that day on, I have often felt 6 years old.
posted by SaintCynr at 11:44 AM on September 12, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, was the most glurgeful YA novel I think I've ever read. The main character was an insipidly stupid child with a lisp whose father is an SS officer and moves the family to "Authwithz", where our young protaganist is immediately jealous of the boy he befriends who gets to wear striped pajamas all the time.

The book itself holds no historical value or information, just the fairytale-like story of Bruno and his consistently dense interactions with Shmuel. The lack of historical context make it illsuited as an instructive story for any child who hasn't already been fully briefed on Nazi Germany, and the odd casualness of the horrors and eventual death just don't do the topic justice for younger readers who might still be trying to fathom that segment of history. There's sooooo much Holocaust lit out there for kids that does a much better job at actually detailing the contradictions of the time. Spinelli's Milkweed, for one, has an orphaned child protaganist who is attracted to the power of the SS, but even at the age of six recognizes when another child has been treated cruelly, something Bruno continually misses.

The movie trailer manages to look slightly more intelligent than the book, even with the kid running around like a mental case with his arms out as his side, but they would have to change the entire plot of the novel if Bruno is to be anything other than borderline mentally disabled, since he spends most of the story puzzling over the funny peculiarities of all the people in striped pajamas behind the fence.

As much as I hate hate hated the book, I have to put in my small disclaimer: The YouTube comments for the trailer are surprising positive, considering most YouTube comments take the form of text-message style accusations of various levels of gayness. Most of the comments are still barely full sentences, but they express remarkable fondness for the book. I have therefore revamped my dislike of the book into a grudging acknowledgement that it might have some appeal to very reluctant high school readersreaders. The kids who don't read books can read this book in a very short amount of time, and its mind-numbing premise, I think, comes across as the best bit of literary trickery they've encountered, and that's cool. If they can find themselves really appreciating a book they were assigned in school, well, so be it.
posted by redsparkler at 11:57 AM on September 12, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Never to Young to Know About Related Material:

There is no Santa Claus and one day you and everybody you know will be dead.

Now quit yer bawling and go get ready for supper.
posted by tkchrist at 1:46 PM on September 12, 2008

I dunno if anyone else out there is old enough to remember The World at War.

I took specialized topics course 3 semesters back about WWII and our professor showed us a number of excerpts from that series. It was fascinating. I only wish we would have had enough class time to watch it in its entirety - despite the sadness and anger and disbelief if caused.

As an aside, that course was by far the best I've ever taken. Never missed a single lecture despite it being a three hour class.

Also. The music looped on the website is used (with slight variations) in another film composed for by James Horner. "Swing Kids" (1993), directed by Thomas Carter, was also about WWII and how it effected the lives of "kids" - though, this time they were teenagers. Worth watching.
posted by Kimothy at 3:44 PM on September 12, 2008

Re: The World at War:


But I can still clearly remember watching the newsreel footage of nazis shovelling the naked bodies of jews into mass graves, and the painfully emaciated faces and bodies of the people in the camps as they were liberated. I suppose I might have been nine or ten at the time? Was it Susan Sontag who says that we divide our lives up into those periods before we learned about he holocaust, and then afterwards?


This was exactly my experience at age seven in the upper Midwest in the United States.
posted by ferdydurke at 3:56 PM on September 12, 2008

electricinca wrote: Actually This Is England was given an 18 certificate due to the very strong racist violence and language.

My mistake - I was getting mixed up with the decision by various local and city councils to overturn the 18 certificate and grant it a 15 (I'd still give it a 12A myself - it's less violent than, say, the recent Batman flick).
posted by jack_mo at 7:00 AM on September 28, 2008