The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (released as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in North America) is a 2008 historical drama film written and directed by Mark Herman. It is based on the 2006 novel of the same name by John Boyne. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland, the film follows the son of an SS officer who befriends a Holocaust prisoner of his age. It was released in the United Kingdom on 12 September 2008. It received generally positive reviews from critics for being touching but was panned by scholars for misrepresenting elements of the Holocaust. Plot Bruno, an eight-year-old German boy living in Berlin, is uprooted to rural occupied Poland with his family after his father Ralf, an SS officer, is promoted. Bruno notices an extermination camp near the back garden from his bedroom window, but believes it to be a farm; his mother Elsa forbids him from going in the back garden. Ralf organises Herr Liszt, a private tutor, to teach Nazi propaganda and antisemitism to indoctrinate Bruno and his sister, Gretel. This combined with Gretel's crush on Lieutenant Kurt Kotler, a young colleague of her father's, makes Gretel fanatical in her support for the Nazi agenda. Bruno struggles to adjust to the rhetoric in the teaching after Pavel, a doctor-turned-family slave, comes to Bruno's aid after he sustains a minor injury. Bruno sneaks into the woods, arriving at a barbed wire fence surrounding the camp. He befriends Shmuel, another eight-year-old boy. Both boys are completely unaware of the true nature of the camp; Bruno believes the striped uniforms that Shmuel, Pavel, and the other prisoners wear are pyjamas, while Shmuel believes he is only there temporarily and that his grandparents died from an illness on the journey to the camp. Bruno meets Shmuel regularly, sneaking him food, and learns that Shmuel is a Jew who was brought to the camp with his parents.