'Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' Book Week costume suggestion sparks parent outrage
Parents have been outraged after the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was suggested as a costume idea for children's Book Week.
The 2008 film, set in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, follows a young German boy who befriends a Jewish child who wears a striped uniform after having his clothes taken away.
In a blog post, Children's Book Daily, listed the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas as one of its "23 easy Book Week costumes" suggestions, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
"One for older primary kids to honour, all you need are a pair of striped pyjamas," the post read.
But parents were outraged at the "offensive" suggestion, and the blog post was quickly removed.
"Did they pause to think about how deeply inappropriate and bizarre it would be for school children to show up at a party dressed in this way?" chairman of the Anti Defamation Commission, Dvir Abramovich, said in a statement.
Megan Daley, who runs the website, shared an apology on Thursday, saying the writer "had no thought beyond honouring a much loved children’s book."
"I acknowledge and own what a thoughtlessly insensitive mistake this was," she wrote.
"Robust online feedback was swift and I personally need to take a short offline break to fully recover."
The Facebook post sparking the heated debate over the costume has also been removed.
More than 1.5 million children were killed in the Holocaust and in the film, the character wearing the "striped pyjamas" dies in the very final scene.
