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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: A Review
Based on the award winning novel by John Boyne, THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS is a heartrending fable of the holocaust powerfully told from the naive perspective of Bruno, the young son of the newly appointed Commandant of Auschwitz, who while exploring the neighboring “farm” befriends Shmuel a dejected Jewish boy whom he meets each day at the barbed wire fence surrounding the Nazi death camp.
This incredibly moving British film THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS is a poignant fable full of subtle ironies, powerful symbolism, and visually striking juxtapositions of good and evil. The inhumanity and brutal efficiency of the Nazi death camp is potently brought home to the new commandant when his naive son Bruno while out exploring befriends a lonely distraught Jewish boy who sits cross-legged each day at the fence surrounding “the farm”. Longing to play together despite being separated by barbed wire fence, the boys hatch an adventurous plan for Bruno to exchange his clothes for the “striped pajamas” of the prisoners, dig under the loose fence, and join Shmuel to help find his missing father who hasn’t been seen in three days.
Obliviously, the boy’s quest goes tragically awry and their forbidden friendship unexpectedly becomes eternal when they suddenly find themselves trapped in a clot of prisoners being herded into a stark air-tight windowless bunker apparently to “shower”. The film climaxes with the distraught commandant and his wife searching frantically for their beloved son when they stumble upon Bruno’s discarded wet clothes at the base of the fence. Perplexed the commandant looks down to see the slack fence and disturbed ground when in horror it dawns on him the ultimate fate the “final solution” has woefully wrought in Germany as acrid smoking ash rises ominously from the camp’s tall chimneys. In the book the author John Boyne caps his enlightening parable with this sardonic admonition: “Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age” See this thought provoking film and pray he is right!
