The Boy in the
Striped Pajamas is a tale of a boy named Bruno. One day Bruno comes home to
find that he and his family is moving from their house in Berlin to a place
that Bruno calls Out-With. After building a tire swing Bruno falls off and gets
a cut on his knee and since he couldn't find anyone else their waiter, Pavel,
offers to treat it for him. While
treating it Pavel tells Bruno that he used to be a doctor before he came to
Out-With. Bruno eventually gets very lonely and when exploring the fence he
meets a boy on the opposite side of the fence named Shmuel. Bruno and Shmuel
become friends and talk every day even though they don't know what is going on.
A month later while Bruno and his family are having Pavel, who, like all the
people in the striped pajamas seems to be losing a lot of weight, loses his
grip on the wine glass and it falls directly into the lieutenant who they are
having dinner with's lap. The lieutenant gets very angry and shoots Pavel on
the spot, which greatly disturbs Bruno and which also points out to him that
maybe all the people in the camp are not equal. Bruno and Shmuel are talking
one day and Bruno offers to help find Shmuel's father who has been missing for
the past 3 days. Bruno agrees and crawls under the fence where he and Shmuel
and a bunch of other people are gathered up into a group and marched into a gas
chamber where they are gassed to death.
This book
has a very interesting perspective of the world. Bruno lives in 1940s World War
II era Nazi Germany but he still remains oblivious to what is really happening.
The book takes the phrase the innocence of childhood to a whole new level. It
tries to shield the reader from the reality of what is happening by using
different or subtly altered words (which also might be because Bruno is only
eight years old so he just can't pronounce them) like fury for fuehrer and Out-With for Auschwitz. The lone voice of
dissent in the book from what is happening in Bruno's country comes from his
own grandmother who disapproves extremely of what her own son(Bruno's father is
the head of the Auschwitz death camp though the book does not come straight out
and say that) is doing to advance his career.
The theme
of this book is that friendship knows no bounds. Bruno and Shmuel are two very
people, separated physically by the fence and mentally by their very different
life experiences, yet through the power of chance and loneliness they end up
becoming friends. Bruno and Shmuel are oblivious to the horror that is
happening all around them and I think that is part of what helps them become
friends in the first place. They are the least jaded of any of the people
around them. All of the adults in this book are not able to tell Bruno what is
really happening and even thought Shmuel lives in the camp he also has no idea.
This book appealed to me because I
have always been interested in World War II and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
offered a whole new perspective on it. In most of the books about World War II
I have read the main character is always a soldier on the allies side and is
nearly always about 19 years old. I enjoyed how The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
shows you the world through the eyes of an 8 year old boy being raised in Nazi
Germany. I would recommend this book. Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a great
story with a powerful ending. Read it!
