by Richard

In the elementary school all three of my little dudes attended, part of each fifth-grade year is taken up by studying WWII and the Holocaust. So, for three fifth-grades we’ve had little dudes reading stories like The Diary of Anne Frank and Number the Stars. This year, however, was a little different. Speed Racer came home and said his teacher said the class should watch a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

This was a movie I’d never heard of. Turns out there was a reason for this. The movie was only released last year to, apparently, very little fanfare and with very little in the way of promotion only a year after the book on which it was based. Which is a shame, because this was a supremely depressing movie that was so well-acted and well-written that you don’t notice the depression until a few minutes after the horror wears off.

Yeah. Not a good combination for the most part, but pretty appropriate for a story dealing with children and the Holocaust. I watched the movie with Speed Racer, and my wife, known to me as She Who (Sometimes) Knows A Good Movie When She Sees One, and we could not take our eyes off the TV screen even for a little while.

The movie deals with Bruno, played by Asa Butterfield, his mother, sister and father, who is a high-ranking and fast-rising officer in the Nazi German army and has recently received a promotion. Because of the promotion, the family will be moving away from Berlin and to a house in the country. Once there, Bruno gets bored with hanging around the house and goes for a wander in the woods nearby.

What he discovers is a farm that is surrounded by electrified barbed wire and inhabited by people who all wear striped pajamas. Sitting on the other side of the fence is another young boy, Shmuel, played by Jack Scanion. Bruno and Shmuel quickly become friends despite their background and current circumstances. Bruno comes to visit Shmuel every day at around the same time and they talk and share stories.

Despite being able to see a little of what is going on in “the farm,” Bruno doesn’t grasp what it actually is. He doesn’t figure out that his father is the commander of the notorious death camp called Auschwitz and that Shmuel and all the other Jews in the camp will eventually be herded into showers, gassed to death and then cremated in giant ovens. What Bruno does know is that sometimes the farmers burn things in the huge smokestacks and that the resulting smoke smells terrible.

The movie makers do a great job of allowing the watchers to discover, piece by piece, just what it is that Bruno is missing. Throughout the movie, Bruno never loses his childhood innocence, even when he convinces Shmuel to find an extra pair of pajamas, digs under the barbed wire fence and joins Shmuel inside the camp to look for Shmuel’s father, who has disappeared. Although he is a little concerned when the guards tell everyone in Shmuel’s bunkhouse to strip and head to the shower, Bruno still has no idea something is very, very wrong.

The ending is, as you might imagine, quite depressing. It did, however, enable Speed Racer, his mother and I to all have a very long talk about the Holocaust, what really happened back then and why. We also talked a lot about how people could even think about doing something like this. So, yeah, the movie was depressing, but I thought we did get a very nice set of conversations out of it, letting the next generation know that hatred and prejudice is not something good to have.

If you can stand a little darkness in your life, go rent this movie. I give this five dudes out of five.

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