It is no secret that the world looks different through the eyes of children.

At times, the way they see the world can be amusing. Take my sister's stint in an international preschool classroom and her invention of her own language, since, well, that was obviously what all the other children were doing. Other times their perspectives offer more than enough fodder for at least one awkward moment a day. Think of a child's first encounter with an overweight person who isn't pregnant, someone of another race than themselves, or anyone who doesn't fit their lifelong understanding of what is physically "normal." And then there are those moments where even though they don't quite get the nuts and bolts right, it is actually in the simplicity of a child's perspective where the truth is contained and the often warped logic of the adult's in which the truth has been severely distorted.

As the John Betjemen quote that opens the film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas reads: "Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows." And as the movie begins, it is that meeting of the simple innocence of childhood understanding and the darkness of an alternate understanding that we step right into.

Like many eight-year-old boys, Bruno (Asa Butterfield) spends his days running around the streets with his friends, and his nights reading his favorite adventure novels. One day he dreams of being an explorer, and in the meantime, he prepares by exploring the world around him. Unfortunately, with World War II in full swing around his home in Berlin, many of the realities Bruno has yet to explore are harsh ones. And when his high-ranking soldier father (David Thewlis) is promoted within the ranks of the German army, and Bruno and his family move next door to a concentration camp, that harsh reality moves right into Bruno's backyard.

As the story of Bruno and his family unfolds, what reveals itself is the reality of WWII as we know it, the truth of its propaganda as its leaders knew it, and the absolute lack of complete sense that any of it ever made. When Bruno first arrives at his new home and sees the concentration camp outside his bedroom window, he wonders why they are all wearing striped pajamas and asks his mother if he can play with the children at the farm someday. When he learns that their "pajama-wearing" household helper used to be a doctor, he can't quite comprehend why a man would decide to go from being a doctor to being a potato peeler. And when he makes his way to the fence around "the farm" and meets Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old in the camp, it doesn't even cross his mind that they shouldn't be friends.

In one moment when Bruno find himself stuck between his own understanding of who Shmuel is and the almost overpowering hatred and dominance of the Nazi regime, we see his struggle to deal with what he knows to be true and what the most powerful forces around him are pushing him to believe. "Those people, they're not really people at all," says Bruno's father. Jews are enemies that destroy and corrupt all, Bruno's tutor tells him. They are evil, his sister (Amber Beattie) echoes his father. But standing barely feet outside the prison his father runs, Bruno simply cannot find a connection between his friend across the fence and the people who are supposedly such a threat to humankind. Although Bruno's concept of the world and the people in it does not end up actually matching the reality that has forcibly come into being around him, the truth is that the basis of his reality is actually the one that holds the truth in it. When he sees a Nazi propaganda film depicting the activity-filled, summer camp-like life that Jews enjoy inside their work camps and believes it, it isn't so much because he is naïve, but because the reality of what the camps actually are does not make sense. The idea that his father takes people's clothes away from them and beats them is one that is contrary to what any child would ever think to believe of his father. And so, stuck between a reality based on discrimination and hate and one based on unity and friendship, Bruno chooses to believe that truth lies in the one of unity. Unfortunately, in doing so, he also misses the very threat the hate that has distorted his world is, and in an unexpectedly tragic turn of events, his story becomes one that no longer allows those around him to blindly look at what they are doing as right.

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