Eight year-old Bruno is the sheltered son of a Nazi officer whose promotion takes the family from their comfortable home in Berlin to a desolate area where the lonely boy finds nothing to do and no-one to play with.

Crushed by boredom and compelled by curiosity, Bruno ignores his mother's repeated instructions not to explore the back garden and heads for the farm he has seen in the near distance.

There he meets Shmuel, a boy his own age who lives a parallel, alien existence on the other side of a barbed wire fence.

Bruno's encounter with the boy in the striped pajamas leads him from innocence to a dawning awareness of the adult world around them as his meetings with Shmuel develop into a friendship with devastating consequences.