Chapter 18

For a few days Shmuel doesn’t show up in their usual meeting place and in the third day he shows but he looks even more unhappy than usual. Bruno asks him what’s wrong and he narrates him how his father has been missing; according to Shmuel his father and other men had gone of on work duty and inexplicably none of them have returned. Bruno trying to help tells him he would ask Father about the subject, but Shmuel denies saying that the soldiers hate people on his side of the fence and he hates them back. Bruno asks him if they hate Father, to what he says something interesting, “He had seen Bruno’s father on any number of occasions and couldn’t understand how such a man could have a son who was so friendly and kind”. This quote kind of summarizes the whole innocence of Bruno, since it highlights the age difference between father and son and the ignorance this little boy has. But I don’t believe there not that different, because Bruno is friendly with Shmuel because he has no knowledge of the Holocaust and the extermination of Jews, so maybe if he was a couple of years older he would be next to his father, fighting against the Jews. Finally Bruno tells his friend he is leaving, and they found out in the fence there’s a small whole for a kid to pass; so they schedule a play date before leaving to Berlin.