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Life Is Beautiful Vs Night

882 Words4 Pages

The Holocaust and World War Two both sparked many pieces of literature, media and commemoration that reflected the horrific truth of the torture inflicted on Jewish people all over Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. From books, museums, art and movies the retelling of the Holocaust is unique to each author, curator, artist or director. Two examples of media that are very different from each other yet share the theme of World War Two from a Jewish perspective are the auto-biographical book Night by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and the film “Life is Beautiful”, directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. While Night is a very serious book that depicts the true story of author Elie Wiesel’s first-hand experience as a prisoner of a concentration camp; …show more content…

Night is a first-hand account of a young Jewish man’s journey throughout the Holocaust. One message that Wiesel conveyed in Night, and in many speeches, he delivered throughout his life, was that we must remind ourselves of the severity of the Holocaust so that it is to never happen again. The horrifying truth that is written in Night is extremely effective in the telling of the story of the Holocaust because it is the truth. Meanwhile, “Life is Beautiful”, while entertaining and charming, poorly represents the experience of the Jewish people in concentration camps. The Holocaust isn’t supposed to be entertaining and charming and Benigni’s depiction of it in “Life is Beautiful” feels very much like a fairy tale. The first hour or so of the film is very pleasant and I enjoyed it, but as the setting shifted into the concentration camp, and the sweetness didn’t fade away, as it would have in real life, I remembered that Benigni’s story was one of fiction, which the Holocaust was most definitely

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