The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Boy in the Striped Bananas

Author	John Boyne
Language	English
Genre	Children, historical, Tragicomedy, Fable
Publisher	David Fickling Books
Publication date	5 January 2006
Publication place	Ireland
Media type	Print, paper cover
Pages	216 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-385-60940-X
OCLC	62132588
Dewey Decimal	823.914 22
LC Class	MLCS 2006/45764

For the film, see The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film).

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 novel from the point of view of a naïve young boy, written by Irish novelist John Boyne. Unlike the months of planning Boyne devoted to his other books, he said that he wrote the entire first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in two and a half days, barely sleeping until he got to the end. To date, the novel has sold more than 5 million copies around the world, and was published as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in the United States to go along with the traditional American spelling of the word. In both 2007 and 2008 it was the best selling book of the year in Spain. It has also reached number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, as well as in the UK, Ireland, Australia and many other countries.

Plot

Bruno is an 8-year-old boy growing up during World War II in Berlin with his loving mother and father. He lives in a huge house with his parents, his twelve-year-old sister Gretel (whom he refers to as a Hopeless Case) and maid servants called Maria and Lars. His father is a high-ranking SS officer who, after a visit from Adolf Hitler (referred to in the novel as The Fury which Bruno mishears and should be Fuehrer) and Eva Braun, is promoted to 'Commandant', and to Bruno's dismay the family has to move away to a place called Out-With (which turns out to be Auschwitz).

When Bruno gets there he feels a surge of homesickness after leaving behind his family, grandparents, and his 3 best friends for life. He is unhappy with his new home. It only has three floors, there are always soldiers coming in and out of the house and there are no good banisters to slide down. Bruno is lonely and has no one to talk to or play with and the house is so small that there is no exploring to be done. However, one day while Bruno is looking out of his window he notices a group of people all wearing the same striped pyjamas and striped hats or bald heads. As he is a curious child, Bruno asks his sister who these people are, but she does not know. His father tells him that these people are not real people at all. They are Jews. Gretel has changed from a normal young girl into a strong Nazi with the help of her tutor, Herr Lizst, but Bruno does not seem to take the same stance as Gretel. He still prefers adventure books to history books. There is also a soldier called Lieutenant Kurt Kotler who is violent in his ways and shows his disapproval to the Jewish prisoner, Pavel. Pavel works around the house and is always treated badly by Lieutenant Kotler. One day Bruno falls off his swing and Pavel helps him dress the wound. Bruno, in his naivety, asks if his Mother should take him to a doctor, meets a reply from Pavel saying that he is a doctor.

Bruno finds out he is not allowed to explore the back of the house or its surroundings, and his mother forbids him to do so. Due to the combination of curiosity and boredom, he decides to explore. He spots a boy on the other side of the fence. Excited that there might be a boy his age, Bruno introduces himself, blissfully unaware of the situation on the other side of the fence. The Jewish boy's name is Shmuel. He was taken from his family (his father came with him, his mother and his siblings are at home) and forced to work in Auschwitz. Almost every day, they meet at the same spot. Soon, they become best friends. Bruno and Shmuel even shared the same birthday. They are basically the same person born into different circumstances, one a Polish Jew, the other a German. He, across the book shows a great deal of naivety whilst his friend Shmuel seems to have more knowledge of his surrounding as he has felt the suffering first-hand.

Bruno's Mother persuades his Father to take them back to Berlin, while Father stays at Auschwitz. The story ends with Bruno about to go back to Berlin with his mother and sister on the orders of his father. As a final adventure, he agrees to dress in a set of striped pyjamas and goes in under the fence to help Shmuel find his father, who went missing in the camp. The boys are unable to find him.Then the boys are mixed up in a group of people going on a march.

Neither boy knows where this march will lead. However, they are soon crowded into a gas chamber, which Bruno assumes is a place to keep them dry from the rain until it stops. The author leaves the story with Bruno pondering, yet unafraid, in the dark holding hands with Shmuel. "...Despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go".

In an epilogue, Bruno's family spent several months at their home trying to find Bruno, before his mother and Gretel return to Berlin, only to discover he is not there as they had expected. A year afterwards, his father returns to the spot that the soldiers found Bruno's clothes (the same spot Bruno spent the last year of his life) and, after a brief inspection, discovers that the fence is not properly attached at the base and can form a gap big enough for a boy of Bruno's size to fit through. Using this information, his father eventually pieces together that they gassed Bruno to death. Several months later, the Red Army arrives to liberate the camp and orders Bruno's father to go with them. He goes without complaint, because "he didn't really mind what they did to him any more", believing his loss of his son and arrest were severe consequence.

Controversy

The premise of the book - that the camp would have a child of Shmuel's age - is, according to some critics, an unacceptable fabrication that does not reflect the reality of life in the camps. However, John Boyne stated that some Jews under the age of 18 were sent to work for a few months, and then killed. According to statistics from the Labour Assignment Office, Auschwitz-Birkenau contained 619 living male children from one month to fourteen years old on August 30, 1944. On January 14, 1945, 773 male children were registered as living at the camp. "The oldest children were fifteen, and fifty-two were less than eight years of age." "Some children were employed as camp messengers and were treated as a kind of curiosity, while every day an enormous number of children of all ages were killed in the gas chambers."

Rabbi Benjamin Blech said: "This book is not just a lie and not just a fairytale, but a profanation." His chief complaint is that it supports the idea that ordinary people were unaware of the horrors of the Nazis' mass extermination of Jews. He argues that everyone for miles around could smell the stench of death and expresses doubt that the 8-year-old son of a Nazi official could be unaware of what a Jew is (or whether he himself is one). He writes, "Note to the reader: There were no 8-year-old Jewish boys in Auschwitz -- the Nazis immediately gassed those not old enough to work. Also, the Auschwitz death camp was surrounded by electric fences, making any attempts to crawl in through a hole impossible."

External Links

• John Boyne discusses The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas on the BBC's World Book Club