The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

This isn’t a movie review as much as it is a post of frustration and absolute helplessness. It’s one of those times I wish I knew more, never enough, of everything – language, history, people… Language so I may express better. History and people? I don’t know how to explain those. You either get it or you don’t.


I’ve spent a small, probably insignificant amount of time in the last few years looking up details about the Holocaust. Books and movies, the internet and reference guides. The usual. Since History textbooks in school would fly out the window before they elaborated on the period (“Jews were subject to inhuman torture.”), I was lucky to have a mother who was more forthcoming.

Anne Frank’s diary was, and do pardon me for putting it this way, an ideal introduction to the Holocaust for a kid. No, no kid should have to know about something so ghastly. But then no kid should have to live in a world that saw something so ghastly. Ideal? Shall we replace that with ‘appropriate’? I don’t know.

Ideal is hypothetical – Grade 12 physics said so. So do historians, philosophers, gamblers, parents of teenagers, realists and anyone who knows. Damn them all.


I’ve been trying; I can’t say a thing about The Diary Of A Young Girl –or indeed, anything to do with it– without feeling like what I’m saying is wrong. It’s not about being politically correct, it’s not even about what I think is wrong; it’s about how I feel when I try and put my thoughts on paper. Every word seems out of place. Inadequate. Just see the words used so far dammit – inhuman, ideal, ghastly. They simply do not do justice. Words like ‘disgust’ and ‘anger’ mean nothing because hey, aren’t those the words we use when we speak of nasty smells and broken mugs? You’re angry because someone didn’t call you back; you’re angry because millions had to live through “inhuman torture” – Really?

There was The Great Escape, but the spirit and faith aside, it dealt with how a bunch of prisoners of war found a way to beat all odds and break out; sunshine at the end of the tunnel, catchy music to boot. There was Schindler’s List. Oh Lord. There was Vikram Seth’s almost biographical account, Two Lives. There must be hundreds and thousands and thousands of books out there that refer, if only fleetingly, to the Holocaust. And during practically every such book or movie, your stomach clenches, you choke up and pillow covers get replaced.


I don’t know how far it is the collective suffering that elicits reactions and how far the individuals stories. I don’t know if I’m a masochist. Why it makes me think of a dagger being forced in and twisted in a neat circle, I can’t say. In the light of it all, everything else becomes so trivial, so fast it scares me. It makes me want to do something for all world over – Jews, Germans and otherwise. Somewhere, I know chances are I won’t do a constructive thing about it. I know nothing can be done for the people who perished during those years. For their families and souls, in their memory and all, yes. But nothing that would be any help directly. It all just feels like a failed cause, much as we may say being humane now will make a difference. I ramble.


This is one of billions and gazillions of posts, letters and notes written all over the world. Some furious, some intimate, some showing solidarity and others helplessness. As a blog post, it’s pretty useless – unless you decide to go look up the few samples I’ve mentioned. It isn’t entertaining, funny or informative. It’s my take on something that garners a unanimous, identical opinion worldwide. It’s long, it’s vague and it’s repetitive. But it’s something that needed doing. Don’t be surprised if you come across a repeat.

Bottom line? No one deserved to live that life. And no one deserved to die like that.