Tragedy seen through the eyes of children!

Rating: 9/10 (20 June 2014)

Firstly, I would like to say I have not read the book, so I would not pretend to compare the book with the movie.
I watched the movie 2 weeks ago and I immediately wanted to write this review. But I found it hard to rate the film. Giving it 1 or 2 would be an insult to the brilliant cinematic experience of this movie. Giving it 9 or 10 seemed like celebrating the tragedy presented in the film and an insult to the surge of emotions that swept through my body after watching it.
The movie shows a German soldier's kid Bruno befriending a boy, Schmuel, from neighboring Jew concentration camp. He is unable to understand why the boy cannot cross the barbed wires or what is he there for. He is unable to understand why Jews are taught to them by their tutor as evil. He fails to grab that his father is not the hero of a war and just another puppet of the dictator who has been assigned to the eliminate the same people he is trying to befriend. Bruno also does not understand why Jew doctors are peeling potatoes and Jew watch makers fix machines.
Bruno's lack of understanding of events stems from his childhood innocence who desperately wishes to see his father as a heroic figure and who cannot see evil in anyone or anything. His innocence and love for adventure is bound to lead him to his doom in Hitler's Germany.
In the end, as soon as he removes his clothes and wears pajamas, he digs his own grave, metaphorically and literally and ends up being just another victim of Jewish persecution.
The movie presents the idea that the only difference between Germans and Jews were the clothes they were forced to wear, otherwise no one could differentiate between the two, just by looking at them. Hence, the whole point of Jewish persecution by the Nazis was a ridiculous ideology that cost millions of people their lives.
Apart from the Germans speaking in English with a flawless British accent, the movie completely nails the tragedy and doom of holocaust and how ridiculous it seems from the eyes of kids.
Truly children are more smarter than adults!