The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

"Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights,

 before

the dark hour of reason grows."

 

~(John Betjeman)~

 

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, released in the United States as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, is a 2008 historical-drama film based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer John Boyne. Directed by Mark Herman and produced by David Heyman, it stars Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Amber Beattie and Rupert Friend.

This film is a Holocaust drama, and it explores the horror of a World War II Nazi extermination camp through the eyes of two 8-year-old boys; one the son of the camp's Nazi commandant, the other a Jewish inmate.

Rabbi Benjamin Blech described the book as "not just a lie and not just a fairytale, but a profanation". Despite the book's intentions, he argues, the plot is highly improbable and gives credence to the defence that people did not, and could not, know what was happening within the death camps. Students who read it, he warns, may believe the camps "weren't that bad" if a boy could conduct a clandestine friendship with a Jewish captive of the same age, unaware of "the constant presence of death".

However, Kathryn Hughes, whilst agreeing that about the implausibility of the plot, argues that "Bruno's innocence comes to stand for the willful refusal of all adult Germans to see what was going on under their noses".

 

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John Betjeman

 

Sir John Betjeman, CBE (pron.: /ˈbɛtʃəmən/; 28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".

 

Betjeman was a practising Anglican and his religious beliefs come through in some of his poems. He combined piety with a nagging uncertainty about the truth of Christianity. Unlike Thomas Hardy, who disbelieved in the truth of the Christmas story, while hoping it might be so, Betjeman affirms his belief even while fearing it might be false. In the poem "Christmas", one of his most openly religious pieces, the last three stanzas that proclaim the wonder of Christ's birth do so in the form of a question "And is it true...?" His views on Christianity were expressed in his poem "The Conversion of St. Paul", a response to a radio broadcast by humanist Margaret Knight:

But most of us turn slow to see
The figure hanging on a tree
And stumble on and blindly grope
Upheld by intermittent hope,
God grant before we die we all
May see the light as did St. Paul.