Thursday, April 7, 2011

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas


Recently I had the opportunity of watching the movie called, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas", and this movie is about a nine-year old boy named Bruno who is growing up during World War II in Berlin, Germany with his family. After Bruno's father, a high ranking SS officer, gets a visit from Adolf Hitler their family had to move to a place called Out-With, which is actually the concentration camp Auschwitz, and Bruno's father is now the leading officer who runs the camp. When arriving to their new house Bruno is bord so he starts looking around and notices a bunch of people all wearing the same striped pajamas and hats doing the yard work in their back yard. Because of his curiosity he asks his father who those people are and his father tells him that they aren't "real people" they are Jews.

As the movie goes on Bruno eventually adventures into the area that his parents had forbidden him to go. In this forbidden area he finds a huge wire fence where a small boy Shmuel who is about his age is sitting on the other side dressed in the same striped pajamas as the men he had seen before. Bruno and Shmuel become good friends and everyday Bruno bring Shmuel some sort of food for him to eat. The two boys even shared the same birthday. So basically they were the same person except Bruno was a German, and Shmuel was a Polish Jew. The story ends with Bruno about to go back to Berlin. So as a final adventure with his new friend Shmuel he agrees to dress in a set of striped pajamas and goes under the fence to help Shmuel find his father, who had gone 'missing' within the camp. Not being able to find Shmuel's father and it was getting dark and beginning to rain Bruno decides he wants to go home, but as they were trying to get back to the fence they rounded up in a crowd of people who the Nazi guards were marching into a gas chamber, where Bruno assumed was just a place to keep them dry from the rain, and then this is where the movie ends.

I really though that this movie was good at showing the difference of how people think just by the way they are raised. For example with the two young boys and how Bruno was completely oblivious of what kind of discrimination and genocide was going on with the Jews, and how when Bruno asked his father who the men were in the striped pajamas his father said that they were not people they were just Jews. The movie really portrayed how the two boys were exactly the same except for one was a Jew and the other wasn't and just because of something that same they lived completely opposite different lives.

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