spare pair of striped pajamas

*please note: this blog contains a spoiler for the movie "boy in the striped pajamas", so please don't read on if you haven't seen the film.



even though you clearly see it coming, it doesn't soften the blow.

bright-eyed innocence crushed in a net of evil should always feel like an unwelcome slug in the gut.

my mind scrambles for more meaning, so i google to see if this is a "true" story, as in taken from an actual event. the context, of course, is real and the players were put in place in actual circumstances but the ending was the author's choice.
just ever so briefly if you haven't seen it-- a german boy's nazi father is "promoted" to commandant of a concentration camp. "papa" doesn't give either his wife or children the details of where they are going, so the young boy, bruno, thinks the camp is a farm. he has been forbidden to explore but as young, bored boys will do, he does. upon arriving at the "farm", he sees a boy sitting near the barbed wire fence with which he soon becomes friends- the jewish boy himself doesn't understand his situation; but he knows this is no farm. as the story unfolds, bruno's mother finds out the truth and slowly descends into a sort of madness, his sister embraces hitler youth and bruno builds his days around his new friend.

one knows that when you enter a movie, there are times when you suspend your sense of logic. that is the magic of film-- it brings you places you wouldn't have otherwise been able to be. one critic of the film thought it too much, though, to believe that bruno, at age eight, would've been so naive and not figured out his situation.
is that so hard to believe that in the age before show-all television, violent video games and the internet, an eight year old boy might find it hard to deduce that the acrid odor that is spewing from the distant chimneys contains the ashes of his new friend's grandparents, or that a little boy like himself would be put in a work camp when he had done nothing wrong? None of these things makes "sense", so why should he "figure" this out?
in the end, bruno full of an eight year old's sense of loyalty, bravado and curiousity, answers his friend's new call of distress- his father his missing after the last work detail. bruno grabs a large sandwich and a shovel and digs under the fence, dons a set of "striped pajamas" schlomo brings and they are off to search for his father.
unfortunately, efforts to enforce the final solution are stepped up and bruno and schlomo are rounded up with a large group of men and brought to take a "shower". by the time bruno's parents discover where he has gone, he is dead.
how to sort this sadness? what is the greater one? the innocent boy from outside of the fence dying in a brave act, the innocent boy on the inside of the fence dying in a senseless act or the evil that knows no parameters-- the hate of men?

putting on the spare pair of striped pajamas changed bruno's fate; but he chose to wear them as a symbol of solidarity with his friend's cause. perhaps this isn't a cause for sadness but a call to hope. in the midst of great evil, there is the hope of a friend.