Examples Of Prejudice In Boy In The Striped Pajamas

The War on Childhood
I realized the impact of events in childhood when I was watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a movie about an unlikely friendship between a Jewish boy and a German boy during the Holocaust. The unusual friendship and childhood curiosity ends with the German boy sneaking into a concentration camp to meet his friend and both of them dying. At the end of the movie, the parents of the German boy scream in agony, realizing that what happened to both kids, despite their religious background, was wrong. The prejudice resembles one seen in Afghanistan. In the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the growth of fascism and the manner in which it can drastically dehumanize a person and corrupt a childhood is displayed throughout the story. He tells the story

When they were twelve, Hassan had gone to retrieve the blue kite that they had defeated in their victory of the kite-flying competition. Assef and his friends arrive, ambushing and sexually assaulting Hassan. Before raping him, Assef proclaims his message to Hassan about his radical ideologies which, at the time, aligned with the Afghan revolution and the rise of the Taliban. His prejudice for Hassan and Hazaras is shown with Assef claiming “Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has been, always will be. We are the true Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this Flat-Nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our water. They dirty our blood...Afghanistan for Pashtuns, I say. That 's my vision’"(44). This passage exemplifies how the time period factored into growing up by showing how the movement of fascism had desensitized kids with blind hatred to the point where they developed prejudice and hatred for each other. We clearly gain a perspective into this when Hassan suffers sexual abuse and permanently scarred for life. However, the Afghan Revolution was only the beginning of the materialized result was the Taliban, and father like son, Sohrab, Hassan 's son, would face a similar