The Holocaust Through the Lens of a Child

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
Running time 93 minutes
Written and directed by Mark Herman
Starring Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Richard Johnson, Sheila Hancock

At the movies, as in life, there is nothing more harrowing to think about or painful to observe than children in peril. At a time when a lot of people will not go near a film about the Holocaust, it’s quite brave to make a new one (there are three coming out before Christmas). The Boy in the Striped Pajamas shows an aspect of the greatest atrocity in the history of civilization through the eyes of children, which makes it doubly risky. See it at all costs. It is both wonderful and devastating.

Directed by Mark Herman (Little Voice) and faithfully adapted from the best-selling novel by Irish writer John Boyne, it’s about the heartbreaking friendship forged by the son of an SS concentration camp commandant and a young Jew imprisoned behind the barbed wire of the camp itself. Set in the optimistic innocence of childhood, before the darkness of reason, it tells of a privileged 8-year-old child named Bruno, oblivious to the storm clouds gathering above his family’s beautifully kept home. Outside, scenes of passing trucks dragging away the dispossessed through the cobblestone streets of Berlin move across his line of vision like movements in an action movie. But things are about to shadow his complacent reverie when Bruno’s father, a respected career military man with a great value to the Reich (calmly played with cool restraint by David Thewlis) is promoted and assigned to a new, top-secret job in a remote place with the strange sounding name of Auschwitz. Bruno’s older sister, Gretel, adjusts quickly to her new environment, outgrowing her dolls and developing a teen crush on one of her father’s cold, handsome and cruelly dispassionate junior officers. But schooled at home by a private tutor, with no friends his own age to play with, Bruno grows lonely and bored, frightened by the police dogs that patrol the property, intrigued only by the view from his bedroom window of a strange-looking farm on the other side of the woods and the odd farmers who live behind the fences, all dressed alike in what the child mistakes for ragged striped pajamas. Bruno’s father refuses under oath to explain the nature of what goes on in that forbidden camp, and Bruno’s loving but politically ignorant mother (another versatile role for the dazzling actress Vera Farmiga), believing it to be a working farm full of lower-class laborers, warns her son to stay away and forbids him to play in the back garden where one of the old “farmers” named Pavel works as a gardener and kitchen helper, wearing those same dirty striped pajamas under his apron. Unsettled by the foul smells from the chimneys down the road; perturbed by his sister’s newfound patriotism that moves her to paper her room with Nazi swastikas; and troubled by bits of conversation overheard in the house that the kindly Pavel is “a dirty Jew,” Bruno finally lets his youthful curiosity get the best of him, and his sense of adventure leads him to the edge of the bleak camp. Behind the barbed wire, he sees a boy his own age, bruised and hollow-eyed with a shaved head, starving and huddled with his little wheelbarrow full of heavy rocks, hiding from the grown-ups in the background. Children know nothing of social taboos and class distinctions. They’re just happy to talk and play games and share their feelings. So Bruno and the boy called Shmuel form an uneasy but nonjudgmental truce. Bruno brings him food, and Shmuel opens his eyes to the sinister, baffling ways of adults. They’re bound by friendship, but their loyalty is tested when Schmuel is recruited to polish silver in Bruno’s house. Bruno gives him a cake his mother has just baked, the Nazis accuse Schmuel of stealing, and his friend denies ever seeing him before. This Judas betrayal comes at precisely the same time Bruno’s mother discovers the true source of the repellent smoke from the chimneys and the real nature of her husband’s duties. The more his mother sinks into depression from her own naïveté and the horrors around her, the more Bruno’s guilt and remorse draw him to the plight of his little friend Shmuel. When Bruno dresses in the same uniform, digs his way under the barbed wire and joins his friend for the afternoon, the resulting tragedy is shocking and inevitable. To reveal more would spoil the climax, but as I said before, you can prepare to be broad-sided by the impact.

Unquestionably one of the saddest movies ever made, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas left me profoundly shaken. Since it is a child’s view of monstrous world events framed by the open-hearted perspective of innocence and vulnerability, it seems oversimplified at times. But that is its charm. And it is beautifully served by an exemplary cast. Mr. Thewlis is oiled and shiny as the spit-and-polish commandant whose duty overwhelms his life until his humanity as a father is discovered too late. Ms. Farmiga as the helpless mother caught up in the festering menace of lethal times is marvelous. Richard Johnson and Sheila Hancock are perfect as the grandparents who sense the coming terrors too soon and pay a dear price for their wisdom. But it is the two children—blue-eyed Asa Butterfield (so memorable in Son of Rambow) as Bruno and newcomer Jack Scanlon as the tortured Shmuel—who find the dignity to pare away the poisoned peel and flesh out the heart within. The film is not a primer on the Holocaust. It does not dwell on the Grand Guignol aspects of Auschwitz. Nor does it provide a feel-good happy ending. It just tells an unforgettable story in very human terms as easy to follow as a textbook for first graders. It would be churlish to complain about so honorable an effort as this, but I think it might have been doubly powerful acted by Germans instead of Brits and Americans. Still, to be honest, that would have been an even harder sell, and I want as many people to see The Boy in the Striped Pajamas as humanly possible.

rreed@observer.com