How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from Life Is Beautiful.
Quote #4
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.
JOSHUS: I already have one.
GUIDO: This one's a real tank. Brand new!
Boys play war games all the time. It was a thing even before Call of Duty. Guido uses this to his advantage: he turns the real war into a game to hide the truth from his son.
Quote #5
JEWISH WOMAN: That one's new. She learned right away. The lady at the door, she seemed nice when she first came. She's the worst of all!
DORA: At least she didn't send the old ladies and children to work.
JEWISH WOMAN: They don't send old people and kids to work because they kill them. One of these days they'll call them to take a shower. "Children, shower time!" The truth is, they make them shower there in the gas chamber.
There are agreed-upon rules to war, and not attacking, enslaving, or exterminating civilians are a few of them. The Nazis ignored the rules. The very old and very young were useless to the Nazis, because they couldn't work. They were usually separated from the rest of the prisoners and killed within hours of arriving at the camps.
If there's any upside to this truth (and there really isn't, but bear with us), it's the Nuremberg Principles. These guidelines were enacted in 1945 by the International Law Commission to clarify the guidelines for the Nuremberg Trials—the trials that prosecuted Nazi war criminals. They include listing acts of murder and enslavement against civilian populations a war crime and a crime against humanity (Source)
Quote #6
GUIDO: Come here. Where are we here? I might have taken the wrong way. Good boy, sleep. Dream sweet dreams. Maybe it's only a dream! We're dreaming, Joshua. Tomorrow morning, Mommy will come wake us up and bring us two nice cups of milk and cookies. First, we'll eat. Then I'll make love to her two or three times…if I can.
Guido comforts his son (and maybe himself) as they walk through the fog, only to come upon a mountain of corpses. This scene takes artistic license with the history. While piles of victims were found, the Nazis mostly cremated their victims or buried them in mass graves in an attempt to hide the evidence of their crimes.
Here, the image is meant to show the weight of the situation Guido faces in trying to hide these horrors from his son. Being a patriotic citizen of Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, or anywhere in Europe, and suddenly finding yourself in a death camp must have seemed like a nightmare from which you'd desperately want to wake up. Guido's dreams of his sweet former life are definitely tear-jerking.