‘Bawaal’ condemned by SWC for ‘outlandish abuse of Holocaust’

‘Bawaal’ was slammed by a section of the audience for its scene that drew inspiration from the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Now, a Jewish organisation wrote an open letter to ‘Prime Video’ to take down the movie, urging the OTT platform to stop monetising ‘Bawaal’, which trivialises the ‘suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust’.

The ‘Simon Wiesenthal Center’ (SWC), a human rights NGO dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, urged ‘Prime Video’ to remove the film ‘due to its outlandish abuse of the Nazi Holocaust as a plot device’.

The statement said, “Directed by well-known Indian filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari, the film’s storyline which is set in contemporary times, leads to scenes in which the protagonists enter a gas chamber in Auschwitz and are suffocated while wearing striped clothing. Hitler is used as a metaphor in the movie for human greed, with the main protagonist, saying to his wife, ‘We’re all a little like Hitler, aren’t we?’”

Slamming the film and director Nitesh Tiwari, SWC’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said in an open letter, “Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of man’s capacity for evil. By having the protagonist in this movie declare that ‘every relationship goes through their Auschwitz’, Nitesh Tiwari trivialises and demeans the memory of six million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime.”

Further speaking about how the film trivialises the murder of millions during the Holocaust, he said, “If the filmmaker’s goal was to gain PR for their movie by reportedly filming a fantasy sequence at the Nazi death camp, he has succeeded. ‘Amazon Prime Video’ should stop monetising ‘Bawaal’ by immediately removing this banal trivialisation of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.”

Soon after the film was released last week, social media users shared their reactions to the film drawing a far-fetched and insensitive parallel between the lead pair’s romance and World War II. In ‘Bawaal’, Janhvi Kapoor and Varun Dhawan imagine themselves as people entering the gas chamber at a Nazi camp. The two actors are dressed in striped clothing. Hitler is used as a metaphor for human greed in the film.