Because he represents the rest of the world during this time. Not many people, or countries, truly understood what was going on in the concentration camps, or how gruesome they were. Propaganda videos were sent out depicting the camps to be something completely different than they were. In the videos children were seen playing and there is an imaginary café. Of course we know that this is not even close to how terrible life was in the camps. Bruno is not the only ignorant character, his mother also was not aware of what was really going on inside the camps or “farm” as Bruno called it. Her husband had kept the secret of the gas chambers from her, which in turn caused her to lose all trust and respect for him. Again, we find ourselves feeling bad for Elsa, but what we don’t think about is how much she did know.
She was by no means innocent. The mass killings might have been kept from her, but she was well aware of the deportations to the labor camps, and how the prisoners were treated inhumanely. She knew this because she saw it first hand in her own house. She allowed a prisoner names Pavel to work under her roof, and be treated unfairly. If she didn’t like what she saw she could have spoken up to her husband about the situation. Her biggest fault was when she accepted and agreed with her husband when he told Bruno “they are not real people”.
In sharp contrast to “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” “The Pianist,” is much more autobiographical. We learned that the film’s director, Roman Polanski, is a Holocaust survivor himself, which probably helped contribute to the movies historical accuracy. Very early on in the movie we see how brutal the living conditions and treatment are in the Warsaw ghetto. One of the hardest scenes is when we see the ghetto wall being built up and just on the other side of the wall the non-Jews are at the markets buying food and living a normal life. Inside the walls of the ghetto we see famine, and cramped, and inhumane living conditions. Most movies we have seen, and testimonies we have read, have been from the inside the concentration camp fences. “The Pianist” was able to give us understanding of what life was like in the Ghettos before the Jews were sent off to the camps.
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I consider this movie to be an accurate display of a time during the Holocaust that is not always discussed. We are able to see Szpilman and the Jews living a somewhat normal life in the opening scene of the film. Then we watch and follow along with them as they begin to understand their fate; from the scene where the family is gathered around listening to the radio and are told they will be relocated to the ghettos, to the scene where they are put into the cattle carts on the way to the actual concentration camps.
I found Szpilmans character to be interesting, he was not a hero by any means or an outsider, he was a survivor and we were able to follow his memoir and see how much luck played a part in his survival. This I found to be a very similar theme to most of the testimonies we read. If you survived, you survived because of luck. However, I did find myself attached to Szpilman’s character which made the film ever more difficult to watch. It was hard to watch the dehumanization that played out during the film, of him and is family.
We also were able to get a sense of how historically authentic “The Pianist” is because of how the film plays out in perfect chronological order. We are shown dates at the bottom of the screen to better understand at what time frame during the war the scene took place. Szpielman never had a flashback scene and we mostly see what he sees through his own eyes. We are also shown that not every Jew was perfect. For example, Itzak was a Jewish policeman who was very brutal with fellow Jews when he did not need to be. This was the reality in the ghettos, and from what we have read in previous testimonies, in the concentration camps as well. We saw fighting, stealing, and the smuggling of food. Children would even crawl through the gutters to smuggle food into the ghetto. There was a scene of a little boy stuck between the ghetto and the other side of the wall and he was brutally beaten to death over a small portion of food he had stolen.
It was the scenes like this one that really gave viewers like myself a better understanding of what the circumstances were really like in Warsaw. Another particularly gruesome scene was when Szpielman and his family witnessed, from their kitchen window, Nazis march into a Jewish home, make the entire family stand, and when a man in a wheelchair did not stand they tossed him over the balcony to his death. Scenes like this one showed the audience just how horrible living in the ghetto really was. Another particularily horrific scene took place while Szpilman and his family waited in the courtyard to be deported. A woman near them was screaming, “Why did I do it? Why did I do it?” (The Pianist). The family learned that the poor mother had smothered her own child out of fear that the Nazis would have heard its cries and killed it. The unimaginable crime of a mother killing her own child does not seem true, but the sad reality was it happened all the time.
It is nearly impossible to compare the film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to the film “The Pianist” however, both films explore the context of family during the Holocaust. I found myself thinking, while watching “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” for the first time, that the film was over exaggerated by Hollywood, and that it would not fulfill the expectations of someone who is as fascinated with the history of the Holocaust as I am. After watching the film twice more I have a different understanding and appreciation for the film. While not historically accurate, it still gets the viewers thinking about the Holocaust and it does leave a lasting impression on us. During my first time watching “The Pianist” I had a much different opinion than I do now.
I originally thought the film was maybe too historically accurate, if that is even possible. I found myself shielding my eyes from the graphic scenes and stopping the film every once in a while. Now, I realize and can appreciate how important it is to see a film like this one. Together, both films are part of a large genre of Holocaust representations that speaks to its twentieth century viewers and gives us a purpose, as viewers. It is important that viewers see both of these films in order to ensure that a horrific genocide, like the Holocaust, never happens again. Holocaust survivors unfortunately will not live forever, so it is up to movies like “The Pianist” and “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” and testimonies, like the ones we have read, to tell their stories.
