Transcript Pre-reading

Year 12 English
2B
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• A novel by John Boyne (published by Random House in 2006)
• The movie first opened in cinemas on
April 23rd 2009
• It is considered a fable, or a short moral story
Fable
• A story about mythical or supernatural
beings or events
• A short moral story (often with animal
characters)
• A deliberately false or improbable account
Themes
•
•
•
•
•
Exploring an innocent perspective
The essence of friendship
Acts of humanity
Understanding obedience and conformity
Exploring prejudice and discrimination
World War 2
• Before reading the novel it is essential that you have an
understanding of the events of World War 2
• World War 2, also known as the Second World War, was a
war fought from 1939 to 1945 in Europe and, during much of
the 1930s and 1940s, in Asia.
• The war in Europe began in earnest on September 1, 1939
with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, and
concluded on September 2, 1945, with the official surrender
of the last Axis nation, Japan.
• It was the largest armed conflict in history, spanning the
entire world and involving more countries than any other
war, as well as introducing powerful new weapons,
culminating in the first use of nuclear weapons.
Adolph Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945)
• Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National
Socialist German Workers Party commonly known as the Nazi Party.
• Adolf Hitler announced on many occasions the "annihilation of the Jews"
living in the territory under his control. In his mind, murdering millions of
Jews could only be accomplished under the confusion of war - from the
beginning he was planning a war that would engulf Europe.
• World War 2 caused the greatest loss of life and material destruction of any
war in history, killing twenty-five million military personnel and thirty million
civilians.
• Hitler's first written utterance on political questions dating from this period
emphasized that what he called "the anti-Semitism of reason" must lead "to
the systematic combating and elimination of Jewish privileges. Its ultimate
goal must implacably be the total removal of the Jews."
• Approximately 11 million people were killed because of Hitler's genocidal
policy and his Nazi Regime led to the annihilation of more than six million
Jews during the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism
• Anti-Semitism (also spelled anti-Semitism or
anti-Semitism) is prejudice against or hostility
towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their
ethnic background, culture, and/or religion. In its
extreme form, it "attributes to the Jews an
exceptional position among all other civilizations,
defames them as an inferior group and denies
their being part of the nation[s]" in which they
reside. A person who practices anti-Semitism is
called an "anti-Semite."
Holocaust
• The Holocaust (from the Greek
ὁλόκαυστος [holókaustos]: hólos, "whole"
and kaustós, "burnt“], also known as The
Shoah (Hebrew).
• It was the genocide of approximately six
million European Jews during World War II,
a programme of systematic state-sponsored
extermination by Nazi Germany.
The legal definition of genocide
Excerpt from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
Genocide
"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide
The Holocaust
• The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January
1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and
that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to
the so-called German racial community
.
• During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also
targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial
inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the
Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other
groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and
behavioural grounds, among them Communists,
Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.
The Holocaust
• In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over
nine million.
• Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi
Germany would occupy or influence during World War II.
By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed
nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of
the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews
of Europe.
• Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority
danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi
racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma
(Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically
disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional
settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia
Program.
•
In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National
Socialist government established concentration camps to
detain real and imagined political and ideological
opponents.
•
Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS
and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other
victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps.
•
To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as
well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the
Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit
camps, and forced-labour camps for Jews during the war
years.
Concentration Camps
• Were prisons used without regard to accepted norms of arrest and
detention.
• They were an essential part of Nazi systematic oppression.
•
Initially (1933-36), they were used primarily for political prisoners. Later
(1936-42), concentration camps were expanded and non-political
prisoners including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Poles were also
incarcerated.
• In the last period of the Nazi regime (1942-45), prisoners of
concentration camps were forced to work in the armament industry, as
more and more Germans were fighting in the war.
• Living conditions varied considerably from camp to camp and over time.
The worst conditions took place from 1936-42, especially after the war
broke out. Death, disease, starvation, crowded and unsanitary
conditions, and torture were a daily part of concentration camps.
Auschwitz
• Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing centre where the largest numbers
of European Jews were killed during the Holocaust. After an
experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and
ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine.
•
By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz,
where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some
estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed
through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning
• 9 out of 10 were Jews. In addition, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and prisoners
of all nationalities died in the gas chambers. Between May 14 and July
8,1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 148
trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during the
Holocaust.
• At Auschwitz children were often killed upon arrival. Children born in the
camp were generally killed on the spot. Near the end of the war, in order
to cut expenses and save gas, cost-accountant considerations led to an
order to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into
open burning pits.