Little did he know that he would encounter a boy, the exact same age as him, named Shmuel who was on the opposite side of the fence. Near the end of the story, Bruno disguises himself as a concentration camp prisoner using the stripy blue and white uniform. When going to Shmuel's camp, everyone is ordered into the gas chambers where they are killed from a lethal dose of Zyklon B.
In the book it took a while before the family found out what had happened, while in the film adaptation they found out even before he actually died.
Wiki Content. Nazi authorities stamped out resistance to the regime quickly and brutally. Shmuel is a young Jewish boy who Bruno meets whilst exploring near his new home. The first time they meet, Shmuel is behind the barbed wire of a concentration camp. Over the course of the story the two boys create a friendship despite being separated by the barbed wire fence.
As an audience we learn a lot about Bruno, so he becomes a real little boy in our imaginations. However, Shmuel is only ever depicted as a one-dimensional victim. This means it is harder for the reader to empathise with Shmuel and his situation. However, Jewish resistance did exist both in and outside the concentration and death camps. At Auschwitz-Birkenau a group of Sonderkommando Jewish prisoners forced to do the terrible work of herding people into the gas chambers, then removing the dead bodies successfully managed to blow up one of the crematoria and kill a number of guards.
It is important that people understand that Jewish people did not go to their deaths without trying to save themselves. A small number of children were chosen for medical experimentation but these children were kept away from the main camp. Even if Shmuel had been selected for forced labour he would not have had the opportunity to spend most of his days sitting on the outskirts of the camp. Both boys are swept up in a group of prisoners being taken to the gas chamber, where all of them are murdered.
Shmuel represents the 1. When he asks his father who those people are, he responds that they aren't really people. Bruno is forbidden to explore but boredom, isolation and sheer curiosity become too much for him. One day, he follows the wire fence cordoning off the area where these people live from his house. He spots a dot in the distance on the other side of the fence and as he gets closer, he sees it's a boy. Excited by the prospect of a friend, Bruno introduces himself.
The Jewish boy's name is Shmuel. Almost every day, they meet at the same spot and talk. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, Bruno decides to climb under the fence and explore Shmuel's world. After some initial tonal clunkiness where you can almost detect the author thinking "how do I write a child", the story is an effortless read that puts you directly into Bruno's worldview.
It is elegant story-telling with emotional impact and an ending that in true fairytale style is grotesquely clever. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel is rendered with neat awareness of the paradoxes between children's naive egocentricity, their innate concept of fairness, familial loyalty and obliviousness to the social conventions of discrimination. For me, as an adult reader, however, the fact that this fable is set in living history - the Holocaust - did, at times, jar.
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