The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyle; Random House Children’s Books/ David Fickling Books (c) 2016; ISBN 978-0-385-75107-0; 218 pages including discussion questions; $17.99
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — This novel is being brought back after a decade; its impact on its intended audience of young readers likely to be sad, horrifying, and eye-opening–exactly the reactions one would expect to a novel dealing with children’s deaths in the Holocaust.
Although the title is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, in truth the novel is more about Bruno, the 9-year-old, naive, and utterly apolitical boy who lives a lonely existence with his family in the commandant’s house at the “Out-With” concentration camp. His father, the commandant, has been sent to oversee the camp by a man with a little mustache, whom Bruno calls “The Fury.”
Adult readers understand immediately that “Out-With” is Auschwitz; and the “Fury” is the German fuehrer Adolph Hitler. But for young readers the whole matter of the Holocaust may be as big a mystery as it was to the fictional Bruno, who could not comprehend what was going on at the death camp, even though he lived next door.
We meet Bruno as household staff in Berlin are packing up his belongings and those of his father, mother, and older sister. They are leaving their comfortable five-story house, filled with places to discover, for a new house far away. When he gets to the smaller home, Bruno discovers that while his sister’s room looks out on a wooded landscape, from his window he can see a tall fence, with loops of wire atop it, and beyond the fence, well off in the distance, there are many people who all are wearing striped pajamas.
Lonely for his friends back in Berlin, he watches the people in striped pajamas from his far away window. He is envious of them because unlike him, they have lots of people to keep them company — not only other people in striped pajamas but also soldiers.
Upset that he has no friends, Bruno decides to go exploring. He walks along the long fence line, and after a while, finds a boy sitting on the other side. The boy speaks German, although he is from a place called Poland, which Bruno learns is the country in which he is now residing. The boy, whose name is Shmuel, is someone to talk to. It turns out that they are exactly the same age, born on the same date.
So Bruno returns again and again to the fence line to meet with Shmuel. They find the bottom of the fence can be turned up to pass things back and forth. Bruno often brings Shmuel food, because he is very thin. Shmuel can tell that Bruno knows nothing of the conditions in the camp, and when Bruno asks questions about friends, and games, and play on the other side of the fence, for the most part Shmuel is tactful in his answers rather than forthcoming.
One day, Bruno is found to have lice in his hair, and as a precaution his parents shave Bruno’s head to the scalp. At a subsequent meeting with Shmuel, the boys laugh that they now look the same, only Bruno is a little fatter.
Bruno’s curiosity about the camp cannot be satiated, and as the day approaches before he is scheduled to move back with his mother and sister to Berlin, Bruno arranges for Shmuel to bring him some striped pajamas so that he can visit the people on the other side and also help to search for Shmuel’s missing father.
The consequences of this little excursion, as you might imagine, are disastrous.
An interesting aspect of this fictional tale is that the older, discerning reader–no matter his or her background–feels a fondness for little Bruno, and wants to cry out with alarm as Bruno makes his foolhardy plans to disguise himself to look just like Shmuel.
Although it stretches one’s imagination to believe that the 9-year-old son of the commandant of a Nazi prison camp wouldn’t have an inkling of what was going on, the more important real-world point is that during World War II there were indeed little German children for whom war was an incomprehensible, though dangerous, mystery. And after the war, many more children were born, who clearly had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust.
So we all must be specific when we blame the “Germans” for the deaths of the Six Million in the Holocaust. Yes, it was the Germans who were alive in that era and were above the age of understanding. Those who came after them are blameless, yet feel almost as heavy a burden of history as we Jews do. For although we Jews born during or after the war had collectively lost our families, those Germans of our age were also victims, because they had to bear the awful knowledge that their parents and grandparents either were depraved murderers or were the people who by saying nothing had given their silent assent. Such a psychological inheritance can be overwhelming.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)