Boy In The Striped Pajamas Imagery

Families being torn apart, being ripped from everything they’ve known growing up and being isolated within a camp where no one truly knows what’s happening to them. That’s what was going on in the life of the Jews during WWII, they were being treated as if they were no longer human, being tossed in concentration camps and given just a number completely taking their identity away. The atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust are being subtly portrayed in the movie “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,”directed by Mark Herman, a story told in the eyes of an eight year old boy named Bruno and his unlikely friendship with a Jewish boy named Shmuel. The movie tells the story of how a young boy begins to realize what kind of solder his father truly

At the beginning of the book once Bruno and his family move from the city to the countryside, he make a discovery when looking outside of his window. He notices a big fence with huts, the huts were being described as low maintenance as they saw looked very small, and it was “all [full of] dirt.” As young children Bruno and his sister are noticing that the place in which those “farmers” live can’t be very sustainable, as they don’t have much of a place to grow food. They then describe the type of behavior they witnessed inside the fence, “some stood perfectly still in there groups...some were formed into a sort of chain gang and pushing wheelbarrows from one side of the camp to the other” (23). What the children were seeing were labor camps, also known as concentration camps; however, they were so enclosed in this privileged environment that they had no idea what they were truly looking at. They saw kids “huddled together and being shouted at” (24), which they seemed to believe was some sort of rehearsal. The children were being mistreated the parents were being treated as slaves as they were being forced into perform manual labor for free, and bruno and her sister believed they were there on their own free will. That exact same scene in which Bruno see’s the camp for the very first time is portrayed just the same in the movie, the camp looked dead with no life

When looking at the movie one can assume that the color choices for the set are due to the time of when the movie takes place. That is however, only one contributing factor to the color scheme as it tells much more than the erra but it tells the story of how two young boys are living two drastically different lives during the same era. When looking at one of the first scene that bruno meets shmuel the switching from boy to boy demonstrates the daractic difference between color scheme. While Bruno's side is full of vivid colors, from the greenness of the forest, to the yellow of the beautiful flowers behind him, and just the proper way in which he’s dressed. However, when the camera then changes angeles from Bruno’s side of the fence to Shmuel side all the color from bruno’s side suddenly disappears. The screen is then suddenly filled with dark colors, such as gray from the rock and metal that fills the camp, to the dirty white and blue striped uniform Shmuel is forced to wear while being held prisoner in the camp. This is starting to bring into perspective how at a young age boy young boys are being separated by this thin layer of a metal fence, which is shaping them to be two completely different people. The use of this color scheme puts into account how the colorful colors in the burnos side of the fence fortary how all seems well in his world, as he has no awareness