Bollywood film Bawaal, directed by Nitesh Tiwari, has triggered outrage over a few scenes depicting Auschwitz–Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp-turned-memorial dedicated to Holocaust victims. In the film’s trailer, the lead couple, played by Janhvi Kapoor and Varun Dhawan, are seen visiting Auschwitz. In another scene, viewers say that a dialogue compares the upheavals in their marriage to the Holocaust saying, “Every relationship goes through their own Auschwitz.”
Viewers have also pointed out several other scenes that intercut enactments of World War 2 with arguments between the couple as their marriage seems to fall apart. Yet another dialogue that has sparked controversy claims that “everyone has a bit of Hitler inside them.” A nightmare sequence that shows Janhvi Kapoor’s character trapped in a gas chamber while Jewish people are killed, has also led to viewers saying that the film trivialises the Holocaust.
While the film, that released on July 21, attempts to retell the history of the Holocaust which leaves the couple deeply shaken, it also includes multiple scenes in which the couple imagine/dream themselves in the concentration camps, where they navigate troubles in their own marriage through the experiences of Holocaust survivors such as those of a fictional Jewish couple torn apart in Auschwitz.
Another scene that has come under the radar shows Varun’s character imagining himself being made to leave his home with an hour to decide what he wants to take with him in comparison to the way in which the Nazis forcibly evicted Jewish people and took over their homes.
Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp, a prison, and a place of enslaved labour of Jewish people and those who opposed the Nazi regime. As the official website of the Auschwitz Memorial points out, the camp was set up in Oswiecim, a Polish city annexed by Hitler’s Third Reich. The history of Auschwitz, as the online Encyclopedia Britannica explains goes like this: “Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were Jews. Also among the dead were some 19,000 Roma who were held at the camp until the Nazis gassed them on July 31, 1944—the only other victim group gassed in family units alongside the Jews. The Poles constituted the second largest victim group at Auschwitz, where some 83,000 were killed or died.”
The scenes from Bawaal have also caused international anger, particularly among the Jewish community. In a statement, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights organisation, has said, “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 6 million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime.”
The statement further adds, “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 should stop monetizing Bawaal by immediately removing this banal trivialization of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.”