Character Analysis
Kids have it pretty good in movies.
The entire Goonies crew manages to survive a booby-trapped pirate cave crawling with hardened criminals. Short Round never once has a crazy cultist try to rip his heart out. And all of the kids from The Nightmare on Elm Street get good and murdered. (What? Don't think they were so lucky? Sure, they're dead, but now they don't have to be in any of those horrible sequels, do they?)
But perhaps the luckiest kid in movie history is Joshua (Giosué) Orefice.
Er, in a way.
Taken from his sixth birthday party by the Nazis, he's sent to a concentration camp with his family. Chances are that he'll be killed there (in reality, most young children were sent right to the gas chambers from the transports), but thanks to his father's quick thinking and a whole lot of luck, he manages to survive.
Luckier still, his father manages to hide the horrors of the extermination camp from him by pretending the whole affair is an elaborate, if difficult, game.
So give the circumstances…lucky. Even though the circumstances themselves are far from it.
It's clear from the get-go that Joshua adores his dad, and that the feeling's mutual. It's this total love and trust in Guido that lets Joshua go along with Guido's slightly altered version of the life-threatening reality that starts on his sixth birthday.
Childhood, Interrupted
As a character, Joshua's pretty symbolic: he represents the joys of innocence and a hope to maintain that worldview in the face of reality's uglier aspects.
In the first half of the film, Guido has this innocence about him, too. We can see it in the scene where Eliseo attempts to explain that the racists in the Italian community will begin targeting him soon. Guido laughs this off:
GUIDO: With me? What could possibly happen to me? The worst they can do is undress me, paint me yellow, and write, "Achtung, Jewish waiter." [Laughs.] I didn't even know this horse was Jewish.
Thanks to his innocence, Guido enjoys a love of life and a hope for the future.
But Guido's innocence is destroyed in the concentration camp, where he sees exactly what they can do to him simply because he's Jewish. Not wanting his son to suffer the same fate, Guido quickly conceives of the game:
GUIDO: That's it! It's that game where…it's the game…we're all players. It's all organized. The game is the men are over here, the women are over there. Then there's the soldiers. They give us our schedule. It's hard, you know. It's not easy. If somebody makes a mistake, they get sent right home. That means you have to be very careful. But if you win, you get first prize!
JOSHUA: What's the prize?
GUIDO: Uh, first prize!
ELISEO: It's a tank.
What follows is a series of events where the reality of the concentration camp attempts to steal Joshua's innocence and hope, and Guido must quickly come up with some fantastical explanation for why things are the way they are.
When the German soldier explains the camp rules, Guido "translates" those rules to be in line with Joshua's imaginary game. When the camp guards order all children to the gas chambers to be killed, Guido creates a game of all-day hide-and-seek. And when the other kids tell Joshua the truth, Guido lies that it's their sneaky strategy to win.
Despite it all, Joshua manages to keep his innocence throughout the ordeal, believing his father's stories because he completely trusts and loves Guido.
Isn't life great before you learn to be cynical?
At one point, Joshua's childishness even saves his life. When the guards come to take all the children to the shower, Joshua, still imbued with his stubbornness, refuses and runs to the factory to find his father. Guido tells him to go take a shower, but Joshua refuses:
JOSHUA: I'm not going to.
GUIDO: Yes, go take a shower!
JOSHUA: What are you doing here?
GUIDO: We're making…a tank. We're building the tank. We're still working on the tracks. We're running slow. You can't stay here. Go take your shower.
JOSHUA: I don't want to.
GUIDO: You stubborn thing!
Here, an all-too familiar scene from childhood, a boy refusing to take his bath, is morphed into an act of rebellion. Joshua's refusal to take a shower is really a refusal to fall in line with the Nazi's plans. In keeping his son's innocence, Guido unknowingly prevents Nazis from succeeding in their goal (i.e., killing Joshua) since we learn later the showers are really the gas chambers.
Tanks for Playing
Against all odds, Guido manages to keep the charade going until the night the Nazis decide to abandon the camp. Hiding his son in a box, Guido tells him the game is almost over:
GUIDO: They're looking for you. Just for you. All this is over you! You're the last one. The last one to find! They're even looking under the rocks. The game is over tomorrow. They'll give the award.
Guido then looks for Dora at the women's side of the camp, but he's caught and killed before finding her. As the soldier marches him to his death, they pass Joshua's hiding spot. Guido gives his son a final gift, one last laugh thanks to a silly march.
Joshua emerges from the box the next morning, just as the liberating American army rolls up in a tank. Of course, Joshua doesn't realize the truth; he thinks he's won the tank. We can tell he hasn't realized the truth as he exclaims to his mother, "A thousand points to laugh like crazy about! We came in first! We're taking the tank home! We won!"
His beloved dad was right after all.
This final line of the film lets us know that Guido succeeded in his goal. Joshua kept his life, his innocence, and his hope in the future—all of which the Nazis attempted to take from him. As a result, Joshua continues to harbor that love of life that we saw in Guido during the movie's first half. Together, Guido and his son defeated the Nazis.
Joshua's Timeline