(2008) Unhappy to depart Berlin, leaving behind his chums when his father (duty over choice) receives a military promotion, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), an unsuspecting eight-year-old, becomes bored at the countryside residence with no playmates until he meets Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) on the other side of an electrified barbwire fence.

Apparently taking place early in World War II (the Germans appear to be optimistic), based on John Boyne's novel, writer/director Mark Herman's unflinching film looks at the unimaginable through innocent eyes; James Horner supplies a delicate, subtle, sadly knowing score.

The boy asks his parents about the children and odd farmers nearby who wear pajamas, one of whom, Pavel (David Hayman, also a producer), performs chores in the kitchen and garden. His father, Ralf (David Thewlis), the kommandant, says simply: "Those people … they're not really people."

After Bruno suffers an accident on a tire swing, Pavel (formerly a physician) bandages the boy's knee; Bruno can't understand why a doctor would then choose to peel potatoes.

Taking lessons with his 12-year-old sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) from Herr Liszt, their elderly tutor, Bruno (who prefers adventure books) is informed of the terrible deeds of the Jews. Gretel, a serious patriot enjoying the attentions of Lt Kurt Kotler (Rupert Friend), explains to Bruno about the work camp for the "dangerous vermin," the evil Jews: "They're the reason we lost the Great War."

None of this makes sense to the child because he has a friend, a Jew, also eight years old, to whom he brings food and a football; Bruno says to Shmuel that it's not fair being alone on the outside when inside the camp there are other children with whom to play, all of whom must be involved in a game since they wear numbers on their pajamas. When a whistle's blown, Shmuel runs off with his wheelbarrow.

Some days when the smoke rises from the chimneys, the air smells horrid. Stealthily Bruno watches a propaganda film his father has made about the camp: "it looked so nice."

One day Shmuel appears in his pajamas with shorn head in Bruno's home, cleaning glassware; the German lad offers his friend treats on the table intended for guests. But when Lt Kotler enters, demanding to know how the Jew got food, Bruno denies knowing the boy, saying instead that he'd helped himself to the food.

When Elsa (Vera Farmiga), Bruno's mother, finally realizes the actual purpose of the camp, she cries, "The man I married is a monster," and insists that this is "no place for children." The two children are to go to live with a relation in Heidelberg. But now Bruno, a born explorer, doesn't want to leave behind Shmuel with whom he expects to share an adventure inside the camp.

Over the past few years several new histories of the Second World War - The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans; Life and Death in the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche; Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IX: German Wartime Society 1939-1945, edited by Jörg Echterncamp; Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution by Ian Kershaw - have concluded, as Benjamin Schwarz states in his book review for The Atlantic, "that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews."

One of those who knows and expresses her displeasure in sarcasm is Ralf's mother Nathalie (her son cautions that her opinions could get her in trouble), while his father is all for the program to rid the Fatherland its filthy corruption; Nathalie's awareness may have made her sick to death.

"Three decades of scholarship (a good deal of it undertaken by Kershaw, as well as by the historian David Bankier, in his innovative study The Germans and the Final Solution) reveal that from the very onset of the war, it was impossible not to know the Jews' fate," writes Schwarz.

One death is a tragedy; six million are a Holocaust.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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