However, I just watched the movie, and for the first time in my life I think I can actually say I prefer a film to the original source.

(Wait.  Scratch that.  I also like the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility better than the book, but I’ll let Jane Austen off the hook because it was her first novel and I’m sure if she’d had a little more experience, her version would have been just as good as Emma Thompson’s.)

Anyway…while the film version of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas remains doggedly faithful to the novel, it omitted what I now realize to be my key irritation with the book, which is the author’s device of depicting Bruno’s naïveté through his consistent mispronunciation of key words (fury for Führer and outwith for Auschwitz).  Also, the movie never named the concentration camp, which I thought lent a great deal more plausibilty to the premise of A) a free boy being able to observe the workings of a concentration camp from beyond the fence without being noticed by guards (not that other camps weren’t as horrific as Auschwitz, but its being the most notorious one, made it, in my opinion, perhaps not the best choice for the novel’s setting) and B) a young Jewish boy not having been immediately gassed upon entering the camp along with his grandparents.

So while the premise may still require an overall suspension of disbelief, the movie erases the flaws of the book so that this glimpse into the way we perceive good people and evil people (or, more accurately, people who are both good and evil — or have the capacity for both good and evil, which is all of us) stands out in a deeply profound way.  It’s a story that lingers with you after you’ve turned the final page (or turned off the DVD player), particularly after viewing it and having such clear visuals.

For me, even more than the utterly disturbing last scene, is the prominence of Nazi propaganda throughout the film.  Which was one other aspect of the book that bugged me; a boy Bruno’s age surely would have been indoctrinated against Jews in school — especially a boy who’s father ranks high enough to be made kommandant of a major concentration camp.  But this is not so in the book for the sake of Bruno’s absolute ignorance when he meets a young concentration camp inmate.  While the movie does stay true to this on Bruno’s part, it makes excellent use of his older sister, Gretel, who, after developing a crush on a young soldier, becomes enamored with The Hitler Youth and hangs on to the children’s Nazi tutor’s every word.  When Gretel is first introduced to us in the film, her arms are full of dolls; later, the dolls are relegated to the cellar while she plasters her bedroom walls with posters of Hitler and the League of German Girls.  The transformation is disturbing, to say the least; I’m not sure which is more so:  the image of a 12-year-old girl being so given over to a dangerous political movement, or of her mother being stunned speechless to see it.

Here I must comment that I particularly liked the way the film fleshes out Bruno’s mother.  The book focuses more on his father, and while the father remains at the heart of the film, I felt that, again, the plausibility of the premise was strengthened by the film’s omniscient point of view, which allowed us to see her dawning realization of just how final “The Final Solution” was.

Which brings me back to the other propaganda image that lingers with me almost an hour after I finished the movie.  At a crucial juncture in the story, Bruno stumbles upon his father, grandfather, and other Nazi officials viewing a propaganda film that depicts Jewish prisoners happily enjoying the “comforts” of the “work camp” after their day’s labor is complete:  they play organized sports, attend concerts, socialize at a cafe.  Bruno sees these images and believes his friend in the concentration camp is okay — that he is, in fact, happier than Bruno, who is not allowed to play in his own back garden and has no friends.  Despite having seen some Nazi propaganda, I’d never seen this, and was astonished and appalled that they could even have dressed up the concentration camps.  I almost didn’t believe it, thought it might have been an invention of the film-makers, so I googled.  Sure enough, a propaganda film was made at Theresienstadt in the now Czech Republic.

I really must get around to reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and watching Schindler’s List, which I keep putting off because I’m never in the mood.  When is one in the mood for the Holocaust?  One must look at it anyway.