Text Review – The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Kelly Lenhardt

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

In the film, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, eight-year-old Bruno moves with his family to the German countryside, due to his father’s – a soldier – recent promotion. However, Bruno finds himself rather lonely, and quite literally jumps out windows to befriend his neighbor, who is trapped behind a barbed wire fence, Shmuel. Instantly, Shmuel and Bruno get along, as they are each other’s only company in a world they do not understand. Is the story told through the innocent eyes of Bruno, as he discovers not only Shmuel’s true identity but his own families, as well as the injustices occurring in his own backyard, to seemingly his own kind.

Due to their innocence and young age, Bruno and Shmuel are able to ignore the labels placed on each other by Nazi rule, and instead see themselves as their true identities, young boys with a desire to play. They are ignorant to the world of injustices occurring daily. In the beginning of the movie, Bruno is kept in the dark by his family of the ongoing devastation only miles away. Instead, he is told it is a farm, but begins to question that notion after meeting Shmuel. While Bruno is unsure if seeing Shmuel is safe or not due to their differing identities and the power of the Nazi’s reign, he decides to keep visiting him anyway. Even though Bruno’s own father is a Nazi soldier, he is able to realize the work he is doing is unjust and form his own opinions. Although Bruno and Shmuel are of very different cultural backgrounds and hold differing identities, they are able to play together as any ordinary children would. The injustice and imbalance of power between the Nazis and Jews do not exist in their universe, as time with together is an escape from the frightening real world.

Although the film primarily tells the story through Bruno’s eyes, it also includes the real-life cruelty the Nazis displayed toward the Jews. Nazis exerted all of their power over the Jews and began placing them in camps, in order to have total control of them. Here, we can relate this to Hegel’s Master Slave Dialect. The Nazis take on the role of Master, thus forcing the Jew to be the Slave. These terms are able to be applied literally here, as the Nazis torture and imprison the Jew for no rhyme or reason. This injustice is an inevitable struggle between the two as Hitler reigns.

Overall, this movie provokes the viewer to not only ask questions but do their own research on the topic as well. While watching, I was intrigued deeper into the ordinary Germans during the Holocaust and wondering if they knew the extent of the ongoing horror. By playing on the pathos side, this film appeals to a wider audience and inspires conversations of the injustice of the Holocaust, by depicting the horrific events scene-by-scene. This movie tells the sad story of two boys from very different cultural backgrounds becoming friends and defying all current political and social odds to conquer the injustice that plagues the adult.