Checkpoint 19 is the antithesis of the Grand Budapest Hotel. Like the Budapest, it's a large, multistoried establishment with many visitors—er—prisoners. It has a strictly-run staff and, hey!—even some complimentary food.

However, where the Budapest features a lavish, colorful, inviting aesthetic, Checkpoint 19 is hard and cold and gray. The guards' uniforms are gray, the stone walls and floors are gray, and the prisoners black and white uniforms are faded to gray. There's hardly any color at all in the prison.

There is something that both the Budapest and Checkpoint 19 have, though, and that's Gustave. His function in both buildings is essentially the same.

His job in the prison is to accommodate the other prisoners (with mush instead of haute cuisine), and his host-with-the-most attitude is unaltered by the oppressive place he finds himself in. Checkpoint 19 is here to remind us that Gustave isn't just a hard working concierge… he's a lovable human being.

Checkpoint 19 is also in this film to remind us of something else: the historical basis of The Grand Budapest Hotel. War is looming in the European country of Zubrowka, and we know by the date—1932—that the war that's looming is WWII. There are signs of WWII everywhere: The ZZ units that occupy the Grand Budapest have an insignia that looks eerily similar to the SS insignia.

It's at Checkpoint 19 that we see one of the most chilling foreshadowings of war. Those striped prison uniforms look a whole lot like the striped uniforms that prisoners in concentration camps had to wear. In fact, there's a suggestion that characters terrorized by the ZZ in The Grand Budapest are a TEXT synecdoche for the main groups murdered in concentration camps:

First, [The Grand Budapest Hotel's] characters are a warm tribute to the three main populations targeted by the Nazis. M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the hero of the film and the head concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel, is openly bisexual (thousands of men arrested after being condemned as homosexuals were estimated to have died in concentration camps). His sidekick, the young lobby boy, Zero (Tony Revolori), is a refugee whose family was slaughtered in their village, standing in for the Roma and other "non-Aryan" ethnic minorities the Holocaust also targeted. The two men are aided throughout by a Jewish lawyer, Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum).

Not only is Checkpoint 19 physically opposite to The Grand Budapest, it's also symbolically opposite. The Grand Budapest in 1932 symbolizes happy, pre-war luxury… and Checkpoint 19 symbolizes the darkness of the war to come.