One Boy’s Regrets During the Holocaust, Nazis and believers of the Nazi ideology ignored their hearts. Propaganda controlled their beliefs while they religiously played by Hitler’s rules. One can not make decisions solely based on the mind without consequences they will eventually come to regret. Pierrot “Pieter” Fischer realizes this theme the hard way after his demons come back to haunt him in The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne. One of the said demons is how he stops writing to his childhood friend, Anshel. He originally had every intention to continue communication with Anshel; he and Anshel even decided to use their sign language codenames to limit the risk of exposure. The issue is, though, he is an impressionable seven-year-old …show more content…
These beliefs set a strict guideline to live life by. Unfortunately, part of this guideline is hating all Jews, so Pierrot cuts ties with Anshel and attempts to forget him. As a sixteen-year-old, when Hitler is gone and Pierrot is free from his grasp, this severance plagues him. He tries to make amends with Anshel, but he knows what his actions have done to their bond. Their friendship can never be the same again. The same theme is present again in another one of Pierrot’s deepest regrets: Ernst’s and his aunt Beatrix’s death. Eleven-year-old Pierrot sentences Ernst and his aunt to death as he reveals they poisoned Hitler’s dessert seconds before he would have eaten it. He betrayed his loving aunt for a manipulative, heartless monster who conditioned him to think without his heart. Pierrot was not the one to pull the trigger, but he later realizes it was his fault the gun was pointed at them. His treatment of Katarina as a fifteen-year-old is another major regret from which the theme stems. He is infatuated with her, but she wants nothing to do with him. Pierrot completely ignores her wishes and essentially forces her to attend a party at the Obersalzberg. Katarina continues to reject him, but he believes he, as a member of the Hitlerjugend, is entitled to her and decides to forcefully