Life is Beautiful

I liked this movie because it helped show the Holocaust effecting Italians.  The father and the son were Jewish but the mother was not.  One day, the mother came home and found out that her husband and her son were taken away to the concentration camps.  The mother said that she wanted to get on the train with them.  I think that shows how passionate she is for her family.  We don’t know whether or not she knew it was a train to get killed but she wanted to stay with her family.  The mother was not able to stay with them throughout their time at the camp because they split the families Males in one line and Females in the other. 

The father was with the son majority of the time.  The son was about 5 years old and was told by his father that everything happening was all part of a game.  The winner of the game gets a brand new tank.  I thought that this was a great way to keep the boy calm because if I was in that situation and knew what was going on I would be terrified.  I liked how everything bad that they witnessed was “part of the game and they were just eliminating players.” 

I also thought it was amazing that when the Germans came to take the kids to shower, the boy hid longer and told his father “I’m not taking a shower.  I took one Friday.”  He thought it was an actual shower but turns out it was the gas showers.  Those kids that went didn’t come back.  Speaking to a kid about going to the showers, they think it is an actual shower.  They are so naïve in a way that they don’t realize they are being taken to be killed. 

  Also when the father puts the boy in that box to hide and tells him to not come out until it is quiet.  When the soldiers came with the dog and the dog was barking at the box, the father distracted the soldiers and he ended up being taken to an alley way.  He was still making a game out of it as he was walking by the box.  That time he walked by the box was the last time the son saw his father.