Childhood In The Kite Runner

The Bloody War in Childhood
I realized the impact of events in childhood when I was watching the movie, 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 see his friend and both of them dying. At the end of the movie the parents of the German boy scream in agony, realizing what happened to both kids despite their religious background, was wrong. The prejudice resembles one similar seen in Afghanistan. In the novel The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini displays the growth of fascism and the manner in which it can drastically dehumanize a childhood. He tells

“The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born...when Russian tanks would roll into the very same streets where Hassan and I played, bringing the death of the Afghanistan I knew...”(55). This passage does an excellent job showing how the Russians would strike fear into the lives of Afghans and regulate their daily lives.. When the author says that the Russian tanks would roll into the streets where he and Hassan played in, symbolizing that his memories of youth would be overshadowed by conflict.His innocence had begun to end and he was now a prisoner of the time period. Hosseini pulls off this feat again in Chapter 10 by showing the stigma created by the Russians. “You couldn 't trust anyone in Kabul anymore – for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, a child on a parent, brother on brother, a servant on a master, a friend on friend. [...]. The rafiqs, the comrades, were everywhere and they 'd split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn 't.” (108). This passage shows how the life of a village had become imprisonment and everyone was only trying to save themselves at the cost of others. Ultimately, we see how the Russians began the end of the normal childhood for Hassan and Amir. However, the Soviet takeover just fueled the purification ambitions of the