A Kitten for Hitler 2007

In the winter of 1941, a Jewish woman and her young son Lenny sit in a dim Brooklyn movie theater, watching a newsreel that shows Hitler in full glare, prompting loud disapproval from the crowd. The mother explains Hitler’s atrocities, trying to shield her child, while Lenny wonders what Santa Claus will bring for Christmas, and she bluntly tells him Hitler won’t get anything that year.

This moment plants a bold, desperate idea: a solo journey to Germany to gift a kitten to Hitler in the hope that the gesture might soften the dictator’s heart. Upon arrival, Lenny presents the boxed kitten to Hitler, who fears it’s a bomb and passes it to his mistress, Eva Braun. She opens it to discover a kitten, and she hands it to Hitler, who is moved to tears. As Hitler embraces the gift, the mood shifts when Lenny reveals a swastika-shaped birthmark on his stomach, and Hitler notices his Star of David necklace.

Horrified and furious, Hitler has Eva slaughter Lenny, and they skin the boy to fashion a lampshade from his hide, the gruesome relic displayed on their bedside lamp, with Lenny’s necklace used as a switch. The war ends, and the lamp is later returned to Rachel, Lenny’s mother, who keeps it as a shrine to her son. When her hand touches the shade, the lamp lights up, and, seemingly by divine intervention, the swastika transforms into a Star of David. This moment is proclaimed a miracle, and [Rachel] stands before President Truman, with the President awarding the Purple Heart to the lampshade itself, turning Lenny’s memory into a controversial symbol of faith and memory.

Across its stark, surreal arc, the story centers on a mother’s grief, a boy’s impossible courage, and a nation’s reckoning with the horrors of war, memory, and the strange, unsettling ways in which faith and history collide.