The Boy In The Striped Pajamas: Film Analysis

Throughout the movie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Bruno loses his faith in his country and starts to identify more with the Jews than the German people because he deems the Jews as more honorable. Bruno’s childhood innocence prevents him from understanding why people hate the Jewish race so much. He unintentionally befriends a Jew working in a camp and starts to see the world in a new light. When Bruno first sees the working camp, he mistakes it for a farm. When Bruno asks his mother about it, she perpetuates this lie that the camp is a farm. Despite his mother’s warnings, he sneaks outside one day to play near the camp. It’s there that he meets another eight year old boy called Shmuel. Bruno remarks “It’s not fair. Me being stuck here while you play with friends all day,” when he meets Shmuel for the first time. Bruno still thinks that the working camp is a farm. The way that the sentence is broken up and what he’s talking about reinforces that Bruno is still a child and doesn’t really know what’s going on. The way he says that he’s the one being treated unjustly goes back to how the German people felt at that time period. Many felt that …show more content…
Bruno is visually representing himself trying to hold onto the belief that his dad is a good man as that belief slips away. Bruno is still trying to fit in with two groups of people that can be seen as polar opposites during World War II: the Nazis and the Jews. He’s expressing how he wants to belong to both of these groups at once, buts he’s struggling to see the Nazis as virtuous people that he wants to belong with. Since Bruno wants to fit in with a group of more agreeable people, the struggle will end in Bruno not fitting in with his father and other individuals like him. This fits in to the bigger theme of how individuals want to be viewed as similar to the group we belong with, whether to look cool or to look like a better