I was a little distracted by the British accents while watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and furthermore distracted by the fact that Vera Fermiga, an American actress, was donning a British accent even though she plays the spouse of a Nazi commandant. On a similar level, I found it hard to believe that Bruno (Asa Butterfield), a boy of eight raised in Hitler’s Germany and the son of a Nazi commandant, seemed to have no knowledge of who the Jews are or of the line that divides him and the Jewish boy he comes to befriend. These technicalities, however, are not important when we move beyond them and view The Boy in the Striped Pajamas for what it is: a film about the innocence of children and the bonds of friendship that outweigh the separations created by war.

Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (adapted from the novel by John Boyne) starts off with the promotion of Bruno’s father (David Thewlis), a leader within the SS, to a higher position. The family relocates to a country house that situates itself near a concentration camp. Bruno can see the “farm” from his window, and his eight-year-old curiosity prompts him to explore. He comes across a boy, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), in “striped pajamas” sitting behind a barbed wire, not knowing initially that Shmuel is a prisoner. Both lonely and bored, they develop an innocent but forbidden friendship. As the film progresses, the reality of the “farm” begins to seep in to both Bruno and his mother Elsa (Vera Fermiga), the proud commandant wife who begins to question the type of war that her husband is a part of.

The film is strongest when we compare Bruno to his older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie), a young, impressionable teenager brainwashed by Nazi propaganda; she even has a poster of Hitler in her bedroom, not unlike how most teenage girls tape posters of rock stars on their bedroom walls. Gretel has already made up her mind about the Jews and the war that is being fought. Like her overly patriotic father who believes that what he is doing is integral to the nation, she doesn’t question what is being done. But Bruno is still at that young age where he feels the need to explore, to question, to be curious. Who are the people working at the farm? Why are they wearing “striped pajamas”? Why has their servant, the older Jewish man, “quit” his former job as a doctor to come work for them? Why can’t I be friends with the boy behind the barbed wire? The film reminds us that children are the purest and sometimes wisest forms of ourselves. All children have this strange ability where, if one sees another, they’ll instantly become friends and it could be prompted by the simplest things: perhaps both of them share the same favorite color or they enjoy the same television programs, or they happen to be wearing the same style of sneakers. When Bruno first meets Shmuel, he asks him how old he is; Shmuel tells Bruno that he’s eight and Bruno’s face instantly lights up: “me too,” he says, as if they’re bound to be friends forever simply because of this one common denominator. Yet, if they were eight years older, both of them would view each other as “the enemy,” both of them would “know better.” Watching this film reminds us that perhaps it’s the children who are the ones who know better — children who are unclouded by politics, complex ideologies, and strange loyalties because, in the end, if we take away all of these external factors, we’re all the same, and no matter how different we think we are, we’re only really separated by barbed wires.

Of course, we need to suspend disbelief when it comes to certain aspects of the film. It is hard to believe that Elsa seemingly has no idea what the “farm” is about; only when their young driver, Lt. Kotler (Rupert Friend) makes a scathing remark about the smell of human excesses coming from the smokestacks does it reign in on her the atrocity that is taking place in the “farm” that is not so far away from their own luxurious country house. But the film, while it’s not Schindler’s List, is a powerful one that needs to be seen. The tragic ending that we know from the beginning the film is leading up to reaffirms that in war, there are no true winners.