The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Over the weekend I went to see a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a story of an 8-year-old's perspective of the Holocaust. Bruno's father is a Nazi soldier, and his family ends up moving to a building not far from a concentration camp so that Bruno's father can continue his work. Bruno ends up exploring the grounds, and he befriends a boy in the camp through a barbed wire fence. He is told by his father that the camp is a farm for workers. I don't want to ruin the ending so I wont say how it continued, but by the end I was balling my eyes out, and it really made me start thinking about Emerson's History Essay and how history always repeats itself. Is that really possible in this situation? Could the absolutely horrific nature of that time period be repeated? I honestly couldn't fathom it or imagine it ever happening. I still don't understand how some people in Germany don't believe it ever happened. That's just ignorance in my opinion. 

If society is like a wave that never advances or retreats as Emerson put it, will we really learn from the mistakes in our past? Is that not our duty as citizens of the world? We talk about these utopian communities in class, and really, thats what the Germans were trying to do. The question that needs to be asked is, where do we draw the line between creating perfection and creating a genocide? The Germans killed millions of innocent people to "cleanse" their country, and how did that help anything? How did that make matters better? Sure, there was propaganda, but like hell if thats an excuse. Utopia's aren't created by wiping out all races. Utopia's aren't even possible, there will always be issues in a society.

As we always say in class, we can never really, truly learn history unless we immerse ourselves in it, and relate it to ourselves and live in it. When I watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, I felt like I was living the hatred, suppression and cruel behavior that occured during every scene. I will never understand the hardship the Jews went through, but in seeing this movie, I at least got a taste, and that's better than nothing. Check out the movie though, its really amazing!