Young Bruno lives a wealthy lifestyle in prewar Germany along with his mother elder sister and SS Commandant father. The family relocates to the countryside where his father is assigned to take command a prison camp. A few days later Bruno befriends another youth strangely dressed in striped pajamas named Shmuel who lives behind an electrified fence. Bruno will soon find out that he is not permitted to befriend his new friend as he is a Jew and that the neighboring yard is actually a prison camp for Jews awaiting extermination.
Review
When my son (nearly 12 years old) read the book he was awake until 5am that night thinking about the story and what it all meant he had some penetrating questions too. A day or so later he said that he thought that it would make a good film and imagine his delight when he saw that there was a film of the book.
I have taken him to see the film and was riveted. I think that the style of the film is really that of an old fashioned family film however the subject matter is emotionally very demanding and all the better for that. It does what good drama should do makes you think and feel. As the credits ran at the showing that I saw no one moved or spoke for a minute or two. The Holocaust is a difficult subject but to tell a story in such a way that it is accessible to a 12 year is a great achievement.
There have been some comments that the cast speak English (rather than presumably German) and that this is somehow a bad thing. What are the alternatives Either subtitles or daft 'ello 'ello accents. In some ways the ordinariness of the Nazis and the family points up the horror of what happened – that ordinary people can do the worst of things to fellow human beings.