Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution or the Holocaust. He is untouched by the horrific cruelties his country inflicts on the European people. He only knows that he has been uprooted from his cozy home in Berlin and placed in a house located in a desolate area where he can do nothing and no one plays with him. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who leads a strangely similar existence on the other side of the adjoining barbed-wire fence and who, like all the people there, wears striped pajamas. Through his friendship with Shmuel, Bruno, the innocent boy, gradually opens his eyes. And as he explores what he is unknowingly a part of, he inevitably falls into the clutches of the terrible events.