What if they had a Holocaust, and only Disney reported it?

Rating: 8/10 (25 November 2013)

THE BOOK THIEF is from Fox 2000 Pictures, part of a conglomerate that is not known for its sensitivity to Jewish Issues. If the Disney people actually HAD adapted THE BOOK THIEF to the film medium, it could not have looked more "sanitized" than director Brian Percival's vision here. The main characters in THE BOOK THIEF are mostly blonds, under the gun because they have Communist parents (an even bigger anathema to Fox than the Chosen People), they don't want to pay dues to the Nazi Party, or merely because they can run faster than the school bully. Unlike THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, wherein the hidden Jews must be quiet as church mice and they're not even in Germany, those in THE BOOK THIEF somehow evade the Gestapo's notoriously meticulous record keeping in a major German city for YEARS, having snowball fights, writing novels, playing Jewish musical instruments, and building snowmen in their basements. The fact that post-war surveys indicated upwards of 90% of ordinary German civilian men and women actively collaborated in, knew of, and supported the extermination of six million Jews, apparently ALL the "good" Germans were concentrated into the one street where most of THE BOOK THIEF takes place. As the uniformed Nazi soldier tenderly carries the wounded main character to safety toward the end of the 131-minute film (only the last 10 minutes of which resembles a war movie at all, in which MILLIONS of so-called Christian German civilians ALSO died), one wonders which movie has the most pristine German Nazi Swastica flags--THE BOOK THIEF or Hitler's old favorite, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL? Unlike the recent Kate Winslet WWII flick, THE READER (another literary-focused look at the Holocaust, like DIARY and THIEF), this movie is more suitable for kids 10 and under. While it may not teach them to appreciate the hardships and horror of War, it could instill more respect for the joys of reading.