Wonderful perspective

Rating: 10/10 (29 November 2013)

The movie was a fantastic and intriguing tale of a young girl going through the holocaust. I believe it to be in good taste and well written. As someone who learned of WWII first hand there are parts of the movie that ring true yet they seem to be the start of much controversy. For example there is a review saying that "90% of Germans had a hand in the extermination of 6 million Jews." (Please excuse the synopsis of the earlier quote) There was an old lady who I talked to quite frequently about her involvement in WWII, in Dachau, Germany (Concentration camp). One of her first comments to me was, "I bet you all think we are monsters." Her reference being in regards to the concentration camp. She went on to tell how thousands upon thousands of Germans truly had no idea what was going on during that time and that they were simply blindly following a man who had taken them out of debt and helped to rebuild a civilization after war. I am by no means condoning what happened but saying that they did not know any better, and with the propaganda during that time how were they to know? She lived in Dachau for her whole life. She told me stories of how, much like Liesel and her family, they did not support the Third Rich but their choice was to blindly support or die. The courage and love shown throughout the movie seem to mask the death and destruction of the war but then again if I had wanted to see a movie about war and death I would have went to see a different film. The tactful way the directors of The Book Thief handled the war from a child's perspective makes it the magical performance it was. I highly recommend this film to all interested in seeing WWII from a different perspective other than the American propaganda we have seen all these years.