The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a 2006 novel from the point of view of a naive 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 Pajamas in two and a half days, barely sleeping until he got to the end. [1] 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. 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. Characters Bruno Hoess: Bruno is the nine-year-old son of a Nazi Commandant. He was born on April 15th, 1934 in Berlin, Germany and has a sister named Gretel. Bruno has brown hair and is constantly made fun of because he is short for his age. He loves exploring and wants to be an explorer when he grows up. Bruno is very upset when his family moves to a place called “Out-With” because he has no friends there.
He goes exploring along the fence outside his new house and finds a boy named Shmuel. The two soon become friends. Gretel Hoess: Gretel is a twelve-year-old girl who loves to play with dolls and rearrange them on her shelf. Gretel is very rude, sarcastic and bossy, especially to her brother Bruno. She tries to act more mature than she actually is which annoys her brother very much. He thinks she is a “hopeless case. ” Gretel always follows the rules and believes almost everything anyone tells her. She doesn’t have any friends at Out-With so she spends her time talking with Lieutenant Kotler .
Shmuel: Shmuel is a nine-year-old Jewish boy who was captured by the Germans. He is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Shmuel was sent to a concentration camp called “Out-With. ” He is a quiet, frail, and very lonely person who spends most of his time sitting at the camp fence. Shmuel meets Bruno and they become friends. Ralph Hoess: Ralph is a commandant in the German Army. He is the father of Bruno and Gretel Hoess. Ralph is in charge of Out-With, the concentration camp outside the house they are living in. He likes to stay in his office and work. Ralph is ery patriotic and does all his work for his country, Germany. Elsa Hoess: Elsa is married to Ralph Hoess. She is a very sophisticated, caring woman who despises her husband’s job. Elsa is very upset with how the Nazis treat the Jews. She wants to take Bruno and Gretel back to Berlin because she thinks that Out-With is no place to raise young children. Maria: Maria is a woman who works as a maid at Bruno’s home. She does all the Hoess Family’s chores every day without complaining and is very dedicated to them. Maria respects Bruno’s Father because he paid for her mother’s healthcare.
Pavel: Pavel is a kind Jewish man who works as a waiter and chef at Bruno’s house. Although he is often treated with disrespect, he never complains. Pavel’s only friend in the house is Bruno. Pavel cares for Bruno when he is hurt and talks with him even though he is not allowed to. Pavel is a weak man who grows weaker every day. Eventually he becomes so weak that he drops a bottle of wine on Lieutenant Kotler, who then drags Pavel out of the room and kills him. Lieutenant Kotler: Lieutenant Kotler is a Lieutenant in the Nazi Army who spends a great deal of time with the Hoess Family.
He is 19 years old and very full of himself. Lieutenant Kotler enjoys talking with Gretel and is greatly disliked by Bruno. He hates Pavel very much and treats him poorly. Pavel spills wine on Lieutenant Kotler’s uniform so he kills him. Lieutenant Kotler is eventually transferred to a different camp, which makes Bruno very happy. Plot Bruno is a nine-year-old boy growing up during World War II in Berlin with his loving family. 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 misshears [like with Out-With] and should be Fuhrer) 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 three best friends for life. He is unhappy with his new home. It only has three floors, there are always soldiers oming 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 bunch 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 though. 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 like slime 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 father is very stern in forbidding 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 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. 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.
Just as it starts to rain and get dark, Bruno decides he would like to go home, but they are rounded up in a crowd of people by the Nazi guards who start them 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 consequences for his anti-Semitic war crimes. Bruno is a nine-year-old boy growing up in Berlin during World War II. He lives in a five-storey house with servants, his mother and father and 12-year-old sister, Gretel.
His father wears a fancy uniform and they have just been visited by a very important personage called the Fury, a pun which adult readers should have no trouble deciphering. As a consequence of this visit, Bruno’s father gets a new uniform, his title changes to Commandment and, to Bruno’s chagrin, they find themselves moving to a new home at a place called Out-With. When Bruno gets there he is immediately homesick. He has left his school, his three best friends, his house, his grandparents and the bustling street life of urban Berlin with its cafes, fruit and veg stalls, and Saturday jostle.
His new home is smaller, full of soldiers and there is no one to play with. From his bedroom window, however, he notices a town of people dressed in striped pyjamas separated from him by a wire fence. When he asks his father who those people are, he responds that they aren’t really people. Bruno is forbidden to explore but boredom, isolation and sheer curiosity become too much for him. One day, he follows the wire fence cordoning off the area where these people live from his house. He pots a dot in the distance on the other side of the fence and as he gets closer, he sees it’s a boy. Excited by the prospect of a friend, Bruno introduces himself. The Jewish boy’s name is Shmuel. Almost every day, they meet at the same spot and talk. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, Bruno decides to climb under the fence and explore Shmuel’s world. After some initial tonal clunkiness where you can almost detect the author thinking “how do I write a child”, the story is an effortless read that puts you directly into Bruno’s worldview.
It is elegant story-telling with emotional impact and an ending that in true fairytale style is grotesquely clever. Bruno’s friendship with Shmuel is rendered with neat awareness of the paradoxes between children’s naive egocentricity, their innate concept of fairness, familial loyalty and obliviousness to the social conventions of discrimination. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is subtitled A Fable and, as in other modern fables such as Antoine de St Exupery’s The Little Prince, Boyne uses Bruno to reveal the flaws in an adult world.
For me, as an adult reader, however, the fact that this fable is set in living history – the Holocaust – did, at times, jar. I couldn’t help comparing it to the immediacy and complexity of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, or, to stick with children, The Diary of Anne Frank. From a perspective of German complicity in the Holocaust, books such as Christa Wolf’s superb A Model Childhood provide images of what it was like to have had a Nazi childhood, making this tale seem rather implausible. Given his father’s rank, it’s highly likely Bruno would have been a brainwashed acolyte of the Hitler Youth.
Perhaps fables are best when, like the The Little Prince with its asteroid settings, they are insulated by either time or imagination from actual history. Still, these are adult quibbles about a children’s book and probably unfair because of it, even if there is a sense this novel has ambitions to follow in the steps of The Little Prince (or Harry Potter, for that matter) and become one of those children’s novels that adults read. None of the scruples above should affect the reading pleasure of the book’s primary audience.
I wanted to test-drive The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas book with a nine-year-old but none could be bribed into reading it within the necessary timeframe for this review. Nevertheless, at the risk of using intuition instead of market research, I envisage children will identify with and be moved by this story, just as I was by books such as Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword at a similar age. Be prepared, however. In its allusiveness, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas will provoke questions about the abhorrent conditions in which it is set and you may well find yourself needing to explain the Holocaust.
