I just watched this movie again. I don’t know why exactly I’ve watched it several times, considering how sad it makes me. I know that I’m being emotionally manipulated, but I can’t help hoping that it will end differently. I find myself thinking that if the crawl under the fence went the other way, that everything will be so much better.
There are plenty of times during the movie where if someone just made a slightly different choice, things would have turned out better for someone, but I find myself really only caring about the boy in the striped pajamas.
Can we talk about movies that you’ve watched more than once, where you still find yourself hoping/wishing/fantasizing that one character makes one different decision?
Well you don’t actually know for sure that he died, it’s just heavily implied. Maybe, just maybe, Bruno survived the gas chamber, pretended to be dead when the bodies were collected, and snuck away eventually fleeing war torn Europe by stowing away on a cargo ship and making his way to California where he changed his name, became a successful architect, married, and raised three boys of his own in a nice home in an Orange County suburb. Of course, not everything was roses - sadly his beautiful wife was taken from him much too soon - but he persevered, met a lovely lady who was raising three very lovely girls…
Bruno was the son of commandant at a concentration camp and would had no needs to go into hiding and if he did play dead he would had been buried alive or cremated alive. And if he moved by mistake he would had been shot.