I was angry when I walked out of TBitSP movie and I couldn't articulate why. I was angry and quiet and my friends could see that and they didn't push me because I couldn't explain to them the reasons. Years later, I'm still angry but now, after reading this, I think I understand why.
A lie made sensational and shocking and with good actors and amazing cinematography and musical score but a lie nonetheless.
I'm not Jewish. But my grandfather was a POW who ended up in a camp next to the female concentration camp Ravensbrück. He saw some horrible things there and... some of those things changed him. I never got to meet him but my mother shared a story he told the family.
The movies and books that aren't written by Jewish survivors of the Shoa, books that are written from perspectives that aren't Jewish and that try to make you sympathise with instigators of an unforgettable, unforgivable, crime... these are books and movies that are lies. Lies told and shared and disseminated to act as a salve on awkward consciences and societal practices that are wrong for the harm they do for no real reason other than hate and bigotry.
I watched TBitSP when it came out and I was angry. I was angry at how it changed a narrative. I was angry at how it made the pain of a man who signed the lives of thousands away a central thing. I was angry at how the focus wasn't on the wrong committed but on the boy and his father and the machine they were part of that Made It All Okay Because He Was Sad At The End.
I was angry that the movie, the book, the whole damned narrative was never about the Shoa and the lives of Jewish people who never deserved what was done to them. The narrative was about someone in the majority not caring until he lost his son and it became A Very Obvious Regret.
I am still angry that the story took a horrific act against a whole people and turned it into a narrative prop for some guy with power and influence and the ability to decide who lived and who died.
I think I'll always be angry at that.
I think I always should be, too.
The Shoa is about Jewish people who suffered for bigotry, politics, generational racism and xenophobia, and more. It is a culmination of all these things and a potent reminder that they deserved None Of It.
Using the Shoa as a narrative device to Make A Man With Monstrous Power Learn Regret (But Only In Relation To His Own 'Noble' Blood That Died) is...
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