The text review I chose to focus on is from a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which is about a Jewish boy growing up in a concentration camp in Germany. This touches on the injustices of racism, we could also look at it as a form of “othering”. Even though this was a fictional single story, it was a powerful one and left people wanting to learn more about the marginalization of Germany.
I can remember when I was a young girl and my brother was showing me pictures of mounds and mounds of dead bodies, bodies in wheelbarrows, bodies lined up on dirt ground. Stripped naked and lifeless black and white Polaroid’s. He had explained to me our great grandfather had given them to our father and it was a part of the holocaust. I don’t know that I was ever so stunned before in my life, I remember feeling so sorry and hearing him tell me they all died because they were Jewish and the leader Adolf Hitler was worshiped over and all the Germans did as he said, they even had their own special solute for this particular leader.
As we have learned over this course the different cultures, intercultural relationships, Identity, injustice, races, religious backgrounds and what all of this looks like when wrapped up in the power of the wrong hands, in this case it cost many lives of humans that did not look a particular way. Adolf started out life in a lower socioeconomic class and grew threw becoming a German soldier then socialist group leader for an organization abbreviated Nazi. He claimed to want to lead the Aryan race to world supremacy, which he attempted to do so through dictatorship and was able to do so for 11 years. The Nazis grew larger and overtook the Jews where they were forced to work or die mostly by gas chambers, many starved to death. We read something similar to this with a single story of Marjane Satrapi and the struggles they were facing if they did not agree with the new government. Injustices like these force people to migrate for a better life, I can remember being a young nurse, 20 years ago, I sat with a patient who had numbers tattooed on his arm, he explained it was from the holocaust and he was so very lucky to escape and start fresh right here in Columbus Ohio. His story was intriguing explaining the identity crisis he had when first moving here and feeling guilt for making it out. He claimed prior to this his nationality was thick and now he has had to restart a new life, he said he fit in fairly well however he did have mass intercultural encounters that made him feel so lonely until he met his wife.
So what I am trying to show here is even though multiple levels of immigration and culture shock existed it was not as unbearable as his dictatorship ran country that starved/gassed their people for not looking a certain way.
references:
History.com Editors. (2020, August 3). Hitler becomes dictator of Germany. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hitler-becomes-fuhrer
Katznelson, I. (2017, October 3). What America Taught the Nazis in the 1930s. The Atlantic.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/