Suffering is not a zero-sum game, even when it comes to the Holocaust. But based on many comments from inside the Jewish community about the new film, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, one might think otherwise. Apparently, the very notion of a film which evokes sympathy for a German, in this case a seven year old boy named Bruno, is simply too much to bear. And that for me is too much to bear.
The movie tells the story of a child whose father is the commandant of what appears to be the Auschwitz death camp. He befriends a Jewish prisoner his own age, a boy named Shmuel. The unfolding of that relationship provides a tragic metaphor for the entire Shoah - one that sagely accepts the impossibility of explaining or understanding the fullness of the horror.
Amazingly, some Jewish reviewers are more concerned about films focus on the story of little Bruno than upon that of Shmuel. One feels the reviewers grasping for arguments (often ridiculous ones) against the film ultimately because they can not accept the loss of a Jewish monopoly on the suffering of the Holocaust.
The primary focus of Hitler's genocidal aspirations was the Jews, but we were far from the only victims.
There are many perspectives from which to tell a story of such epic evil. And there are more victims than we can ever imagine when things go that terribly wrong for the human race. In fact, the ability to appreciate the victimization of others is often central to preventing the suffering of all people.
What would have happened 70 years ago tonight if Germans had believed that the suffering of others demanded their attention? What would have happened if they had risen against the mobs of young men smashing the windows of Jewish-owned businesses and burning cultural and religious centers, on what came to be known as Kristallnacht?
While the concern of Jewish movie reviewers about a film is not morally equivalent to the silence across Germany in what came to be understood as a prologue to the Holocaust, it should trouble us. Any time the suffering of one community hardens its heart to the suffering of others, it should trouble us.
The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas presents an important opportunity to tell the story of the Holocaust as one which all people must know and tell - not because Jews insist upon it, but because in telling this story we remind ourselves that we all suffer any time our vision of a better future demands the disappearance of other human beings. Their suffering, as the film helps us to understand, will always become our suffering. And by contrast, their liberation will always be our own.
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Author, radio and TV talk show host, and President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, Brad Hirschfield is the author of 
0"not Jewish enough to be welcome in any Jewish house of worship. "
I feel sure that the Reform Synagogues would have welcomed you.
"the "true Jews" I've known have almost without exception acted as if they owned all rights of recompense...I almost want to stand up and scream that Germans suffered, too."
Germans suffered because of The War - a war perpetrated by a regime that enjoyed their overwhelming vocal and material support. Jews suffered because they were the primary objects of hatred in the ideology of the same regime.
I can't help but notice a current fashion in thinking current among Germans today: that all actions are equal, regardless of context. Yes, a German Jew killed in a gas chamber was just as dead as a German non-Jew killed by a bomb. Yes, a Jew who had his home seized by the Nazis and a German who was kicked out of Silesia are both homeless. Yes, both German and Jew are "victims".
Yet are they equally deserving of sympathy? I don't think so. Thus, their descendants do not have equal (or even comparable) moral claims to recompense.
Furthermore, there is the factor of time: many non-Jewish German victims of the war - internal refugees - were assisted by the postwar civilian occupation forces (at least food and fuel) and, afterward, the German governments. Recompense for Jewish refugees was much more difficult: How was a Jew, often only a child at the time, supposed to prove that the sale of his parents' home was forced? How often were the relevant records buried in un-indexed boxes in some dusty government office? How to take matters to court if some relevant parties were dead but no death certificate could be produced? How prove that someone is dead if the evidence is locked up with the excuse that officials are protecting the privacy of the victims? It has been a Kafkaesque nightmare that is taking decades to sort out.
And that was just the experience in the West. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet pretense was simply that Jews weren't singled out at all as victims, and that life started over with the arrival of Soviet "liberators". Returning Jews would sometimes be co-opted as administrators, for almost everybody hates Communism, so the Communist bosses could be sure that the Jews would have no choice but to be loyal to them, rather than their fellow Germans - a factor that encouraged anti-Semitism as much as the employment of Jews as tax-collectors by the local nobility encouraged anti-Semitism in Poland.
Robert, you've visited a few of your local graveyards, right? In some parts of Germany, on Sunday afternoons with nice weather, you see the children and grandchildren of the dead gardening with trowels around their ancestors' gravestones. Everything speaks of German tidiness. Over in the fenced-off area of the Jewish section of the cemetery, everything is unkempt and wild - there are no descendants to take care of those graves.
The fact that the Jewish section is messy while the German section is neat seems, in my very limited experience, to perpetrate resentment of Jews - that is, anti-Semitism - among order-minded Germans. That the context is different for the two different groups - is that not something Germans have buried as deep in their souls as their ancestors under the grassy turf?
One more thing: working a death camp was considered an especially stressful job by the Nazis, at least for Germans. Usually their homes remained in Germany while the officers and men were given gobs and gobs of pay and leave time so they could enjoy plenty of time with their families and far away from the strains of their work. (Treblinka, as discussed in A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 ).
I have no problem with the sympathetic portrayal of a German child -- the movie makes the point that it is not just those who are guilty of heinous acts who suffer from them. And after all, at seders we spill drops of wine in memory of the Egyptians who suffered and died in the plagues and in the Red Sea.
But I thought the movie was offensively manipulative and failed as drama and allegory.
So, Solomon2, you are saying that a Jew who was sent to a concentration camp and gassed was morally superior to a homosexual who merely died by having his faced bashed in with an ax handle? Or that Jews are better than Gypsies and Catholic trade unionists? That a Lutheran child born in Germany in 1941 does not begin to have the moral authority of a Holocaust victim born in 1917?
Really? Is the suffering of Jews unique and superior to all other claimants?
Bravo, Rabbi Brad. I saw the movie last night with my 15-year-old daughter (with Down syndrome). Those who are concerned about "sympathy for a German" are forgetting that there is a difference between Germans and Nazis. Just because one is German or German ancestry doesn't make one a Nazi or Nazi-sympathizer. There are, and were, German Jews.
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