The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film)
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, released in the United States as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, is a British 2008 fictional Holocaust film, based on John Boyne's 2006 fictional novel of the same name.
The film received surprisingly negative reviews for a politically correct Holocaust film. One criticism was that it showed the grief of a German family when a German boy by mistake was gassed, encouraging the viewers to feel sympathy for Germans.
Another criticism was that reviewers believed that Jewish children were allegedly all killed when they arrived at Auschwitz, which had not occurred in the film. However, there do were Jewish children as Auschwitz, see Holocaust demographics.
Research by a "Holocaust educator" found that more than three-quarters of British schoolchildren (ages 13–14) in his sample had engaged with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, significantly more than The Diary of Anne Frank. The film was having a significant effect on many of the children's knowledge and beliefs about the Holocaust. The children believed that the story contained a lot of useful information about the Holocaust and conveyed an accurate impression of many real-life events. The majority believed that it was based on a true story. He also found that many students drew false inferences from the film, such as assuming that Germans would not have known anything about the Holocaust or that the Holocaust had stopped because a German child had accidentally been gassed. Other students believed that Jews had volunteered to go to the camps because they had been fooled by National Socialist propaganda, rather than being rounded up and deported. It was recommended to study the book only after children had already learned the politically correct Holocaust version and were less likely to be misled.
