Loss Of Innocence In The Book Night

Lindsay Brown

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,
and tears, like the drops of wax flowed from his eyes. Once, I asked him the question: ‘why do you want people to believe you so much? In your place I would not care whether they believed me or not’.”(p.7) This quotation shows the significance of ignorance and failure to believe that what this member of society is saying is true. They believed that they were advanced enough in that day and age that they would have known if people were actually killing the jews for no rhyme or reason.

In the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Bruno is a little boy who is only 8 years old and is moved by his family next to a concentration camp.
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
camp.

These two young boys both experienced loss of innocence by force.
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.”
(112)

In Bruno’s situation, his main loss of ignorance was when he was in the camp with his new Jew friend, Shmuel and the stones they walked in were the same stones in the propaganda films he saw with his dad. In that moment, he realized the film was shot there in that camp, who his dad was and what he was selling people to believe about these camps.

Everyone experiences loss of innocence and for these two boys it was at a young age. They had experience things that no one should ever have to see and it was at such a young age that they didn’t fully comprehend what was happening until later in life or later in the movie. When serious things happen to people they change and they aren’t as ignorant anymore. It soon becomes rivals and survival of the fittest and for many, they didn’t have the drive to live anymore after their eyes were opened. Their ignorance was bliss until it hit them in their homes and their communities. Theses young boys had to grown up before they were ready. Although everyone at some point loses their innocence, their age and degree of loss is not written in stone. Sometimes, it just takes a push to move forward in life, to mature and understand their place in the world better.