The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

I recently finished reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne.  It’s a great book about a young boy, Bruno, during the Holocaust.  Bruno’s father is an important man in the German army during World War II.  Bruno lives and his family live in Berlin, until they are told by Hitler that Bruno’s father must move out into the countryside to run a concentration camp.  Bruno knows none of this though.  He knows who his father works for, and who asked their family to leave Berlin, but he has know idea what his father actually does, or why his family has to move for his father’s job.  Bruno hates living in their new home and longs for Berlin, until he meets a young boy his age.  Shmuel is very similar to Bruno in many ways, except that they are in completely different situations.  Bruno meets Shmuel after he decides to go exploring one day.  They meet up almost everyday for the whole time Bruno is there, and talk about all sorts of things.  They only talk because there is a large fence that separates Bruno and Shmuel.  On the day scheduled for Bruno’s departure to Berlin, Bruno becomes a little too curious and decides to go over to Shmuel’s side of the fence.  He does not like what he finds there, but unfortunately, he never has the chance to leave.  

An aspect of the book that I found very interesting was the perspectives.  For most of the book, you only get Bruno’s perspective, and some of Shmuel’s perspective.  They are oblivious to everything that is actually going on around them; especially Bruno.  When the two boys first meet they discover, among other things, that they have the exact same birthday, and that they were both forced to move to their current locations on short notice, against their will.  Bruno talks about how terrible it was to have to move to a house with two stories as opposed to five, and how he did not even have time to say goodbye to his three best friends for life.  Shmuel says that soldiers forced them out of their house, took away everything they had, forced them to wear little stars, and then they moved to the camp.  Neither boy knows the full extent of what is going on, but Shmuel at least realizes that he and Bruno are not in the same situation, despite what Bruno thinks.  Bruno argues that all soldiers must be good (because his father is in the army,) and thinks that they are living at a house called Out-With in the German countryside, as opposed to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.  I think that Bruno’s obliviousness to the actual situation, and wrongful belief that his situation is practically identical Shmuel’s highlight something that the author is saying.  This is that the two boys actually are very similar, so why are they in such different situations?  Why is Shmuel on one side of the fence and Bruno on the other?  

I think that one of the main ideas of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne, is that Bruno’s father only realizes what is he is doing after it happens to his own son.  Bruno’s father is a very important man in the World War II German army, but up to the point where he realizes what happens to his son, if he had been asked what he was doing in his work, he probably would have only said that he was serving Germany.  He was serving Germany by running Auschwitz (or a part of it, the book doesn’t say whether or not it is the whole place that Bruno’s dad is in control of.)  There is no definite number of total people who died at Auschwitz, but at least 1.1 million people were gassed to death there (according to PBS).  I do not think that Bruno’s father ever stops to think what serving the German army really means.  I do not think that it is right to blindly serve your country only because it is your country; independently, you should believe in what you are fighting for.  When Bruno finally decides to go over to Shmuel’s side of the fence, Bruno and Shmuel happen to be rounded up, and sent into a gas chamber.  Bruno’s family never found out what happened to Bruno, until one day when Bruno’s father came across a pile of Bruno’s clothing stashed next to the fence.  His father figures things out pretty quickly, and I think that that is when he thinks about what he is doing.  He realizes how absolutely terrible it is, because he lost his own son.  He also probably feels very guilty, his son was killed in a gas chamber run by him, he might have even organized for that very group to be rounded up and killed that day.  He could have just told Bruno what he organized on the other side of the fence, but it would be too bad to tell him.  I think it is horribly ironic that Bruno dies at his dad’s concentration camp, and that Bruno was being taught by his father and personal tutor to support the Nazis the whole time he was living at “Out-With”, and then is gassed to death.    

In conclusion, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne was a great book, that was also very sad.  I thought that the perspectives in the book were interesting; the author subtly explained what was actually going on, while still making it believable that it was coming from a young boy with no real knowledge of the situation.  I also thought that a main part of the book was how Bruno’s father did not realize how wrong what he was doing was, until his own son died as a result of it.