The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is about a boy named Bruno who meets a boy, Shmuel, in a concentration camp. The two become friends from opposite sides of the fence.
The story starts out with Bruno learning that his father, a German soldier, has been promoted and they will have to move to the country to accommodate this new job. Bruno is not happy about having to leave his friends, but his mother promises he will make new ones.
After they arrive, Bruno asks his mother if he can be friends with the children on the farm that he can see from his window. He says that they dress strangely in "striped pajamas" which makes his mother say he cannot be friends with them because they are strange. She knows that the people he is talking about are Jews and doesn't want her son mixed up with them.
Soon after Bruno sneaks away by getting out a window in the back garden shed. (Since you could see the camp from the back garden, Bruno has been told that he is not allowed to be back there.) He runs through the forest and comes upon the fence that separates the camp from the rest of the world. There he sees a boy sitting by himself. They begin talking and Bruno learns his name, Shmuel, his age, eight, and eventually that he is a Jew. Bruno gets scared by this fact and leaves but it doesn't keep him away.
During this time, Bruno brings Shmuel food and games like checkers so they can play. Also during this time, Bruno's mother learns the awful truth of what happens at the concentration camps when she comes home from town one day and smells the stench produced by the burning bodies. The man that was driving accidently told her that it was worse when they were burning then wasn't it? She had had no idea what was going on.
In the end, they had to move again. It was then that Bruno was determined to one last thing for Shmuel: help him find where his dad had been taken in the camp. The last day he was talking a sandwich with him as well to give to Shmuel. In his hurry to leave, he dropped it on the ground as he crawled through the window. Bruno arrived at the fence, get "striped pajamas" from Shmuel, and dug a hole under the fence. When he was finally inside, it was then that he learned the truth about concentration camps. Prior to this he had looked through a window into his father's office and had seen a video of what it was supposedly like in the camps. What he was the exact opposite of what he had thought it would be. He kept looking anyway because he wanted to help Shmuel find his dad. Unfortunately, when they were looking in one of the buildings soldiers came and marched everyone out; to where the boys didn't know.
During this time it had become apparent that Bruno had gone missing. They started searching and found the sandwich that Bruno had meant to give Shmuel but had dropped. They followed his path through the woods using dogs to find his tracks. His mother and sister followed even though his father told them to stay.
But it was far too late. By the time his father realized what had happened, it was too late to change anything. The two boys had been killed in one of the gas chambers.
I thought this was a very sad movie since, after all, Bruno and Shmuel die in the end. I think that it did a good job of depicting how terrible life was for the Jews that were forced into concentration camps as twice it was shown someone getting beaten for a mistake, like when the servant spilled the wine on the table; even though it wasn't his fault since he was bumped but he was still beaten for it. That was the sad reality of the times though. The irony of it is that Bruno was killed in the camp that his father was in charge of, and his father didn't see anything wrong with it until his own son was the victim of the gas chambers.
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