The Boy in The Striped Pajamas and Night: Stories of The Holocaust

The Holocaust was one of the largest mass killing of humans ever. Millions of Jewish people were killed at the hands of Nazi Germany. For almost 6 years, the Jewish people were persecuted and thrown into work camps called concentration camps. Unknown to the outside world, these camps were meant to effectively exterminate the Jewish race and Hitler almost came close to doing so. The novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is told from the point of view of Elie himself at age 15 experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust himself and living to see the end of it all. The film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Directed by Mark Herman, takes the perspective of a young German boy who moves to the countryside due to his father’s role in the German army. Unbeknownst to him or the rest of his family, they live next to a concentration camp and the boy makes a friend on the other side of the fence. Each story has its differences but also its similarities about this terrible event in history.

Starting off with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas or BITSP for short, this story takes place on the countryside of Germany and as I said in the above paragraph, is about a young boy who stumbles upon a concentration camp. His father is a German officer who did not tell his family about the camp. Unlike in Night, the boy in this movie, Bruno, never loses his innocence. He thinks the camp is all just a game and its nice what his father and the other men are doing. And at the end he helps the boy on the other side of the fence, Shmuel, find his father thus, sneaking into the camp. This movie is also a bit lighter in tone and mood, until the end, but for the most part it has a positive tone.

The novel, Night, tells the story of a young boy named Elie. Elie is a 15-year-old boy who is taken to the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland. Elie and his family are separated at the arrival of the camp and only him and his father stay together throughout their years at the camp. Unlike Bruno’s father, Elie’s father was just a normal Jewish man. All throughout the story, there is a deep, sad and depressing tone and is all about the sorrow that the Jewish people suffered.

Both stories depict the horrors of the Holocaust on both sides of the fence and do a great job of doing so. Obviously, these two stories take place in the 1940’s and are set in different parts of Europe. Each story is from the perspective of a child and close to their father. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and both stories do an amazing job of describing and depicting how it was in that point of time and how naïve people were about towards the matter and people on both sides of the war had no idea what was happening.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Night are both amazing stories depicting the Holocaust and each story does a great job of showing what each side was like. The many differences and similarities between these two stories make them both realistic and true to what happened then. As I said before the Holocaust was the genocide of the Jewish race and is said to be the worst doing of mankind ever. We as humans must pay recognition to those who lost their lives and those who are still with us today and come together to prevent such a horror to ever happen again.