The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne is a fable-like children’s story about the Holocaust told from the perspective of a nine year old boy. Bruno does not know he is growing up in the middle of what would become one of humanities great tragedies. 

The thing about exploring is that you have to know whether the thing you’ve found is worth finding. Some things are just sitting there, minding their own business, waiting to be discovered. Like America. And other things are probably better off left alone. Like a dead mouse at the back of the cupboard.

Bruno comes home from school one day to find the maid packing up his belongings. His family are moving from Berlin to an isolated location in the country. His father is a soldier, and his boss the Fury (Fuhrer) has given Bruno’s dad a special assignment.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

The new house, called Out With (Auschwitz), is smaller and less interesting than the one in Berlin and Bruno thinks that moving was a mistake. He misses his friends and grandparents. There is no one for Bruno to play with at the new house, but through his bedroom window he can see people in the distance in a large fenced off area with squat buildings where everyone wears striped pyjamas. The adults in Bruno’s life are a bit evasive when he asks them questions.

What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?

Out exploring one day Bruno meets a skinny boy called Shmuel on the other side of the fence and the two become friends after discovering they share a birthday. They meet on the same spot every day for a year and Bruno brings food for Shmuel. Shmuel tells his new friend that the soldiers hate him and everyone else in the striped pyjamas because they are Jews. Bruno doesn’t believe this would apply to his own father – he is a nice man.

We’re not supposed to be friends, you and me. We’re meant to be enemies. Did you know that? 

When Bruno’s parents decide that he, his sister and their mother should move back to Berlin, Bruno no longer wants to go. Too much time has passed and he has adjusted to his new life and made a good friend – though his family do not know about Shmuel.

He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has received polarised reviews. It is criticised for its historical inaccuracies and simplistic depiction of the horror of the time. It has also been lauded as a beautifully written fable, well crafted to introduce children to a difficult topic. And both those viewpoints can be true simultaneously. How do we introduce difficult, violent, traumatic, but important topics to young people in appropriate ways except by leaving out details?

. . .only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.

My own youthful introduction to this period of history was a book called I Am David by Anne Holm which was also criticised for its simplicity, inaccuracies and improbabilities. Despite this it was a story that left an impression. It made me aware of this particular point in history and engendered a sense of compassion and empathy for those who were subject to the cruelties of war and concentration camps.