In the book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Bruno, the main character, has his first debate with his father, Bruno is very upset about leaving his nice, big home in Berlin. He doesn’t understand how their new home and his father’s new job could be a promotion. Bruno is very upset with his father because he does not like his new reality. He challenges his father and even asks to return to Berlin. At first, his father listens to him, but then he starts to get impatient. Before Bruno leaves his father’s office, he asks who all those people are outside. His father responds, “Those people, ….well, they’re not people at all Bruno.” His father continues to tell him, “Accept the situation in which you find yourself and everything will be so much easier.” At this point, Bruno leaves the office but his father calls him back and gives him a look that Bruno forgot something. Then, “He pushed his two feet together and shot his right arm in the air before clicking his two heels together and saying in as deep and clear a voice as possible-as much like Father’s as he could manage-the words he said every time he left a soldier’s presence. Heil Hitler.” Bruno assumed this meant, “Well, goodbye for now, have a pleasant afternoon.”
This image strikes me because it is the first moment in the book where you can really “see” that the father is a Nazi soldier. This scene is important because it also shows the attitude of the father about the Jews, and it shows how much Bruno does not understand. He thinks that the “Heil Hitler” and the arm movement is saying something nice. He treats it like a normal greeting or a goodbye. This adds to the text because the reader can actually understand how the father is following orders, but also that Bruno must accept it too because his father said so. Bruno treats this departure as something normal because all the soldiers do it. The image of of the clicking of the heels and the right arm in the air symbolizes their identity as a single superior race united in one Nazi cause. So, it shows that Bruno’s father is a Nazi and expects his son Bruno to be one too.