World Through Literature
Loss of Innocence- Night/ Boy in the Striped Pajamas
There comes a point in everyone’s life when the realize their loss of innocence and ignorance and their gain of knowledge and acceptance of the real world. Some experience this loss and life promise at a very young age. For those who are Holocaust survivors, this loss of innocence and gain of knowledge happened as soon as the Nazi regime took over.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie was a young boy just wanting to get closer to his faith and understand the purpose he had in life. He wasn’t the only one ignorant to the warning of one of the community’s members. In fact, it was most of his community. “ ‘They think I’m mad’, he whispered, …show more content…
In the movie Bruno is talking to one of the Jew slaves after he gets hurt and the Jew helps him. The jew tells him he was once a doctor and Bruno thought it was strange that he gave that up to peel potatoes for his family. This shows his pure, child-like innocence. Throughout most of the movie, Bruno remains ignorant of his surroundings throughout most of the movie and thinks that the concentration camp behind his house is just a farm where the people were funny looking pajamas. he soon learns at the end of the movie that the propaganda shows he watched with his Nazi father were a scam once he entered the …show more content…
For Elie, he betrayed his own father to save his own life. It finally came down to survival of the fittest and Elie knew he that if he tried to help his dad from the Nazi soldiers, he would be beaten too. So he betrayed his family and severed family ties to save himself. This was Elie’s moment when he realized his major loss of innocence and that he had played into the role that the Nazi regime had wanted him to. He cut off his own father to save himself and this made the Nazis have a sense of pride because it shows them that they had complete control and power over the “undesirables”. Elie’s complete loss of innocence was when he had to betray his own father to save himself. “No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit over his grave. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I did not weep, ad it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears.”