The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne is about a young German boy named Bruno. His father is in charge of a death camp in Poland at the time of the Holocaust. This posting forces the family to move from their old house in Berlin to a derelict, shabby house somewhere near Warsaw. Bruno sees Jews living on the other side of a barbed wire fence and processes things as a nine-year-old would. “ Why can’t I play with the boys on the other side of the fence?” “ Why are they all wearing grey striped pajamas?” “Why are they trapped behind a fence in the first place?” While trying to make sense of the changes around him, Bruno meets Shmuel, a young Jew. Everyday they talk, and the two become fast friends.

The book is written almost in the form of a diary by Bruno. The author uses the voice of the nine-year old protagonist very effectively – this made the book more interesting for me.

The ending of the book had a deep impact on me. At the end, Bruno along with Shmuel, sneaks into the camp using a disguise and decides to do a bit of exploring. In his disguise, Bruno is mistaken for a Jew, and along with Shmuel and a hundred other Jews, is forced to march to a gas chamber. They are locked up inside, and Bruno is naïve enough to think that the German officers are doing this to prevent everyone from catching a cold. Unknown to him, these are the last minutes of his life, and Bruno declares his friendship to Shmuel before they are both gassed.  This was really touching since Bruno had been educated to think that Germans were the Aryan (superior) race, and that all other races were inferior, especially Jews. This book really made me feel sad about how cruel the Nazis were.

The genocide that was committed against Jews between 1939 and 1945 is often referred to as the Holocaust. An approximate 6 to 12 million Jews, as well as others, such as homosexuals and Gypsies were killed in the Holocaust. The facts I found on the Internet were horrifying. Children, sometimes no older than five, were killed first because they were too young to work. Women were also killed first because they couldn’t work. Men were worked to death, and in 1944, French Jews were forced to construct German beach defenses in preparation for D-Day. A German officer described the clean up ritual of the gas chambers: “ Those who had not been immediately killed by the gas were staring at me like zombies, their skin deathly white with pink and green spots. They were bleeding from their ears and foaming at their mouths. It was a horrible sight.” Many German officers, sickened by Hitler’s laws of anti-Semitism, planned coups to overthrow the Reich. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who had been wounded in Tunisia, engineered one of the most famous coups. In Poland in 1939, Stauffenberg had witnessed SS officers shooting Jewish women in the streets. He was sickened by the sight, and staged a coup that failed. Stauffenberg ‘s story was made into a movie called Valkyrie, with Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg, which is one of my all-time favorite movies.