The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has taken strong objection to the Hindi film Bawaal, which had an Amazon Prime release on July 21. The Nitesh Tiwari movie stars Janhvi Kapoor and Varun Dhawan.
The SWC, an internationally reputed human rights NGO dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, has urged Amazon Prime to remove the film because of “its outlandish abuse of the Nazi Holocaust as a plot device”.
'Auschwitz'
“Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of Man’s capacity for Evil,” SWC’s associate dean and director of global social action, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said in a statement on Thursday.
“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,” 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 (Auschwitz), he has succeeded. Amazon Prime should stop monetizing ‘Bawaal’ by immediately removing this banal trivialisation of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust,” Rabbi Cooper said.
Bawaal during WWII
In the film, the actors are shown visiting places connected to the Second World War, including the notorious gas chambers in Auschwitz in Poland where millions of Jews were gassed to death by Hitler’s army.
Tiwari, however, has defended the film in an interview to an entertainment portal. He maintained that some people have wrongly interpreted the film. Tiwari claimed that he never intended to be insensitive in any way. He pointed out that the characters in the film, Ajju and Nisha, were deeply moved by what they saw at Auschwitz and were not being insensitive.
