The Boy In The Striped Pajamas

Last weekend, Susan and I went to view a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas at one of those funky cinemas that is still locally owned (as opposed to being an outlet of some corporate conglomerate). We have come to expect movies in this particular cinema that are more edgy, fringe, less welll-known. The trailer on this film told us that it was something of substance, and that it was not going to make a big splash in the mainstream U.S. movie-going public.

Still, nothing really prepared us for the cost of watching this specific movie. Not in terms of the cost of admission. In terms of the knife it left in our hearts.

The story is about a dear boy whose father is an officer in the SS, during World War II. He is given a new assignment that takes him out of the beloved and safe family home in Berlin, to a site in the countryside. The young boy is torn from his friends and displaced into a quiet estate house in the middle of nowhere. Little does he know that the people he can see moving around in a neighboring setting are prisoners in a concentration camp. The one his father has been commanded to come and oversee. Little does he know that the rancid smoke that fills the sky every few days is the burning of gassed bodies of dead Jews. And how little does this little boy grasp that the young boy in striped pajamas he meets through the electrified fence of the camp one day is the victim of a malevolent evil that he, his father, and his people have propagated.

As the movie enfolds, we are drawn into a gathering sense of alarm and forboding. Something horrible is building, danger is on every side, risk and tragedy seem to lurk just around the next corner. Every part of ones being begins hoping for a life-giving ending. It is not to be.

When I read the credits at the end, I thought, "Of course. It is a Hungarian film. I should have known." The Hungarians who so willingly collaborated with Hitler in the extermination of Jews and who have spent the last 7 decades doing penance for their evil. This movie is a confession of sin, a self-flagellation filled with the despair of having no saviour to put things to right on their behalf.

If you see this movie, you will come out of it, no doubt, asking "Where is the hope?" Interestingly enough, the movie reviews are almost totally focused on style; NOT on content. There is a deliberate and intentional refusal to engage in the horrid reality of nihilism that one is confronted with as the film ends. The reviewers, almost laughingly, won't even begin to cry out with the hopelessness the movie was intended to scream at us. All they can do is to comment on incidentals, cinematic techniques, and story lines.

There is no hope in the movie. Nor in the book on which the movie was taken (by an Irish writer). Nor in world history. Nor in contemporary politics. Nor in the friendship of the boys. Nor in family relations. Nor in the authority of the State. Nor in the love of a mother. Nor in the
promise the trailer implied.

The only hope one is left with after watching this movie is from the outside. A grace which is left outside the movie and only hinted at in the love of the boys and the mother and the grandmother. A love spoken of only minimally through the lips of the pastor who buries the grandmother. Who has a name, and His name is Jesus.

Go see this movie. But only if you are prepared to bring with you the only hope this world has. The Incarnate One who identified with every wickedness known to humankind and bound it to His life, embraced it, took it as His own, and bore it to the Cross that it might die with Him.