the boy in the striped pajamas

Some deeper thoughts today...

Chandler and I watched “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” on Netflix for an at-home Friday night date. Wow was that a thought-provoking and moving movie. Chandler had seen it before, and he thought I should see it. Now I think everyone should see it.

It’s about a concentration camp under Nazi Germany. But instead of being told from the perspective of those in the camp it was told from the perspective of a young 8 year-old boy named Bruno whose father was one of the higher-ups in the Nazi military. As a young boy of privilege, whose dad was a very important man, he wasn’t really told what his father did. Even his mother didn’t really know. They had to move near a concentration camp that his father was basically in charge of and the natural explorer in Bruno led him to explore near a “farm” where he thought the people dressed in pajamas all day. He thought they were strange, but he didn’t know anything about them. His curiosity was so innocent.

In secret, Bruno met a friend who lived on the other side of the fence at the “farm”. His friend looked weird and had a number label on his clothes, but he was just like Bruno. He wanted to play. He wanted to have fun. He didn’t really know what was going on either. He just knew that some of his family was sent to another work camp and hospital and they never came back.

I won’t give away the end of the movie, because you should watch it. But it was very emotional and tearful at the end. It got Chandler and I thinking and aching for the real suffering people have gone through at the hand of others. It made us feel so blessed to be sitting on a couch in a warm apartment in our sweats,  while other people struggle to find something to eat. We wondered what we could do to bless the lives of others.

It got me thinking… Here were two boys the same age, with similar interests, but because one was deemed to be part of the “enemy” he had the sad lot to live in the degrading and diminishing death camp while the other boy had everything he needed and wanted. What made these two boys different? Nothing really. It was just the label of someone else that caused the Jews’ convictions to turn to their detriment.

I don’t know if things like this still happen today – if they do that is awful – just like it was awful back then. But I have been thinking. Maybe I can’t stop things of this gruesome magnitude, but I can recognize smaller acts of bullying or degrading that happen around me. I can prevent bickering and belittling of others. I can show support and love to others even if their views are different than mine. I have my own beliefs and I am strong in my convictions, but if they conflict with others that is no reason to treat them with less love and human kindness. I can keep others as my friends, and not label them as my enemies just because there is a barrier separating us. We can find similarities through that barrier, just like those boys were friends despite the electric fence separating them.

What got me the most emotional was the fact that these boys were innocent children. They were in their individual circumstances because of the wrong actions of others. And just because one boy had unfortunate circumstances he lost the opportunity to be a young boy like he should be. We are all someone’s child. We all deserve the same respect and love from each other. In a sense, we all have influence over ‘a boy in striped pajamas’. Whether we have children of our own or not, everyone is someone’s child.

Whether it is my boy or someone else’s boy in the striped pajamas it doesn’t matter. We should treat each other with equal respect. In some way every one of us has a boy in the striped pajamas that we care about, and we would all hope that we could be treated with equal kindness.