Customer Reviews

Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

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3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I've read many books that fall into the "Holocaust literature" category. This one may actually be a book that is written in a style that COULD be read by a child but should be read by adults. Whether it is suitable for children depends on how sensitive your child is- and how well you think he or she could handle some very graphic details. They aren't "graphic" in the sense of being spelled out in detail but the reader's imagination can fill in the blanks. At age 9, this book would have been far too intense for me - and the main character in this one, Bruno, is age 9.

The author used a technique which was brilliant, taking readers into the mind and thoughts of a child whose father work for the "Fury" (the Fuhrer) and who is sent to live in Out-With (Auschwitz), on the safe side of the fence, in an actual home.

The novel is labeled "a fable" and I think this was a wise choice by both author and publisher. After all, no one knows exactly how a 9 year old son of a German officer would think and young Bruno seems remarkably naive sometimes. But just as light sets off shadows more vividly, I think his exaggerated innocence allows readers to experience the horrors of Auschwitz that much more. For that reason, I don't think the accuracy of Bruno's character is all that important. The effect on the reader (THIS reader, anyway) is profound and deep.

After moving to Out-With (Auschitz) Bruno meets a boy "on the other side of the fence", one who is the same age, a lad named Schmuel. At first Bruno is envious of the boy who gets to wear striped pajamas all day and who seems to have lots of companions.

On Bruno's side there are few playmates and he doesn't realize that he has so much compared to Schmuel. There is a sudden twist in this tale and I can't write about that. I will say it is the one reason adults should read this book before sharing it with children.

The book isn't quite like any other of this type I've read, not even The Diary of Anne Frank. Each chapter has a simple headline (Bruno Makes a Discovery, Bruno Tells a Perfectly Reasonable Lie) that reads like something a child could write. So do the words of each chapter and I think the child's voice should speak to both the child and adult residing in readers. It certainly did for me!

You'll be haunted by this one. If you get the edition with a Reading Guide included, you will find all sorts of extra features, includng an interview with the author, John Boyne.

Books about the Holocaust are never easy to read. Some are downright terrifying and some make the reader nauseous. This book however approaches this period in history from a new and interesting angle and tells a tale of what might have happened, and in doing so opens up these stories to a whole new generation of readers. The book was originally marketed as a children's book, and then remarketed as adult fiction because of the content. The author claims it is just a book, and soon it will be a major motion picture due out in the fall of 2008.

This is the story of two boys who lose everything they hold dear, yet the reality of their loss is completely different. Bruno's life is changed when his father is given a new job and they move from their five-story home in Berlin to a new home in the country that is only three stories tall. He has lost his 3 best friends in life, and his home with the banister and the attic window that looks out over all of Berlin. His new bedroom window looks over small huts in a fenced-in area where everyone wears striped pajamas. One day while being rebellious and doing what he should never do, he walks along the fence and meets a boy with whom he shares a birthday. Shmuel and Bruno meet most days and sit on the opposite sides of the fence and talk. As their friendship grows Bruno's youthful innocence is challenged.

The novel is told in the third person narrative, but told from a nine-year- old's perspective. Though the reader knows that the story takes place at Auschwitz, Bruno cannot pronounce it, and misunderstood the name from the beginning. Yet in not naming the place the author leaves the story as a much broader tale.

This book is extremely well-written; it takes the reader to a place and time we should never forget, and it reminds us of the human element in all stories. John Boyne has written a book that could become required reading for all school children, and maybe all adults should read it also, lest we forget. So pick it up and walk with Bruno and Shmuel as they develop a growing friendship just sitting and talking through a barbed- wire-topped chain link fence.

(First Published in Imprint 2008-05-02.)

When I picked up the book...something about the colour of the stripes, something about the hue of the colours looked familiar...in a morbid way...and I wasn't sure if I'd want to read it. What intrigued me as well though, was that within the jacket of the book, it said basically that they could not give us an idea of what the novel was about...

I understand why. There SHOULD NOT be a synopsis on this book because you'd regret reading one. If by the first two sentences in Chapter 4 (they're VERY short chapters) you don't know what the novel is about, I'd be surprised. The story that follows needs no description as you are being dragged deeper gradually, even though wondering all the while, "ermm...and so...?"

This novel is indeed about a nine-year-old boy who walks up to a fence. Boyne writes using a voice with an air of innocence that successfully works to punctuate the harsh reality of the "situation/predicament" which is, essentially, what the story is. The ending will send you rereading the last part of the book again, and perhaps again. I read this book in one sitting. Once you've finished...you will be thinking about this one for a while...

The subtitle of this book is `A Fable', and so I suppose we are not meant to look for too much realism in this Holocaust story. Possibly (so one review suggests) written for children, its subject matter is grim enough; but its tone, especially at the beginning, put me off: it is faux-naive and painfully arch; and there are too many unbelievable aspects of it. The central character is nine-year old Bruno. The first false note is struck when Bruno learns that `the Fury' has big things in mind for his father, who is a high-ranking member of the SS and is in fact being posted, with his family, from Berlin to become the Commandant at Auschwitz. Of course it is ludicrous that a nine-year old in Nazi Germany would have misheard - not just once but persistently - `the Fury' for the Führer or `Out-With' for Auschwitz (the puns don't work in German anyway). In 1943 a little German boy, especially one whose father was in the SS, would have been in the Pimpfen, the section of the Hitler Youth for six to ten year olds, where he would already have learnt to worship the Führer; he would have learnt the notion of the Fatherland, which in this novel seems to puzzle him; he would most likely have followed the campaigns of the German army on maps and would have known (as he doesn't) where Poland was; and he would already have become familiar, at least in the abstract, with the concept of Untermenschen - instead of which he doesn't even know what a Jew is, and, when his sister mentions the word, he asks her whether he and she were Jews! He had lived in the Commandant's house at Auschwitz for a whole year - and we are to believe that he had never heard the word!

Some parts of the book are a little more credible. A child would probably not have known what it was dangerous to say (though I have to say that, as a nine-year old myself in Nazi Germany, I did have a pretty good sense of that.) Many Germans, and especially children, would not have known of the horrors of the concentration camps and would have been as uncomprehending as Bruno was of what they saw: the ghost-like creatures on the other side of the barbed wire fence which separated the camp from the neat garden of the Commandant's house.

Bruno hates his new home. For one thing, there are no other children for him to play with. And then one day Bruno disobeys orders and goes `exploring' along the fence and at the far end and on the other side of it he meets Shmuel - the boy (of exactly the same age as Bruno) in the striped pyjamas - who is sitting there all on his own, and they meet in that spot and talk regularly thereafter for a year. Shmuel understands the difference between their situations well enough, but Bruno is impossibly naive and obtuse in picking up the meaning of what his new friend is telling him, though something tells him that he should not tell his family of these meetings. He remains innocent until the end.

Of course the heart of the author is in the right place; and he does convey the horror of the camps; but I could not suspend my disbelief in Bruno - and without that ability, the book did not work for me either as a fable or as a credible story, and so I have some reservation about this flawed way of dealing with the Holocaust.

"The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" is told from the viewpoint of Bruno, a 9 year old boy who moves with his parents and older sister to Auschwitz where his father is the commander. Bruno and his sister are sheltered from the realities of where they are and what goes on behind the barbed wire fence - in part by their parents and in part by naievity stemming from their privileged upbringing.

Bruno is lonely and imagines that the children behind the fence are lucky because at least they have other children to play with. He secretly befriends a little Jewish boy called Shmuel who lives within the concentration camp. They have daily conversations across the fence. As time passes, Bruno gets more curious about what life is like on the other side of the fence and why Shmuel always looks so miserable. Shmuel tries to explain how it is to Bruno, but Bruno's sheltered life has not given him any points of reference by which to understand what Shmuel is saying. Some of these conversations are painful to read as Shmuel is suffering so badly, yet Bruno is so self-absorbed and oblivious to what is happening.

I found it hard to believe that a child of Bruno's age could be so unaware of what was taking place in Nazi Germany. He seemed to have never noticed Jews wearing the Stars of David on the streets, nor even to have heard the word Jew until he hears it from Shmuel. He meets Adolf Hitler and is underwhelmed by him. Given that his father is a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime this seems unlikely and it somewhat undermined the book's credibility for me.

Nevertheless, it is an absorbing book to read. The ending is brutal. Throughout the book you know that this story cannot end happily and you are steeling yourself for various outcomes. Having said that, I didn't see the one that came and it hit me with force.

This is a quick and easy book to read, but I don't think I will forget it easily.

While there has been much debate over the credibility of the historical facts in the story, I don't find this of particular personal relevance. The book tells the story of 9-year-old Bruno who lives in high society Berlin. Seen through his eyes, the reader is taken into a world that Bruno cannot make sense of (his father wears a uniform, they have the "Fury" over for dinner, and they unexpectedly move to "Out-With") and that he can only comprehend in the way a child can. While 9 might be a little old for a child to be this naive, the point of the story is to bring us into a subject matter that will always be difficult to understand. By putting us on the other side of the fence, on the side where the Nazi party and their children live, we are brought into a world that is scary for young Bruno although not nearly as scary as it is for his friend Shmuel, the title character on the other side of the fence.

To analyze the historical inconsistencies doesn't appeal to me as, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I didn't feel like the book did a disservice by placing Bruno with his father rather than in the Hitler Juden. The book is remarakably touching and simple, yet contains some beautiful sentences evocative of a writer who successfully gets to the heart of human evil and cruelty. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in reading about the Holocaust, whether young or old, whose tale of a friendship speaks volumes about the what we as humans choose not to see.

My Number One Reading Consultant John from Matilda's book store in Mount Waverley recommended this book to me without giving any hint of what the story was about which I am grateful for since the book speaks for itself. It is about a 9 year old German boy named Bruno who has to move from Berlin to the countryside because his Father has a new position . Brunos sees a fence and buildings and a lot of people wearing what he calls "striped pyjamas" but he does not realize that he is caught in the middle of the Holocaust of Word War Two at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and the one friend that he makes is of the Jewish Race.This book has a lot of significance for me because my Mother grew up in Germany at the time when this book is set and she has told me that like Bruno a large percentage of grown up German people were unaware of the horrors that Jews in Wartime Germany had to endure. This book is told with the Innocence of Youth and yet is dark and compelling at the same time. This book was so rivetting that I finished it in one afternoon sitting. Thanks again John for yet another great book.

This new book on the Holocaust would make an excellent book for any class where Holocaust is being taught for the first time. The book begins from the point of view, not of the Jews, but from the point of view of the son of a high Nazi official who has come to be the commandant of Auschwitz. The son, left on his own, and knowing nothing about what his father does, begins out of loneliness to go for walks. He finds the camp and becomes friends with a boy wearing "striped pajamas." The ending of the book left me with the word "Wow" and the need to start discussions with adults and students alike.

I am not a big word user, and I'm not telling the whole story again, as some do, but this is a book that I could not put down. It touched my heart, having two small boys myself, I can see and feel deeply how this book can teach children and adults the horrors of the Holocaust, we should NEVER forget!

There's nothing simple about this tale. Many criticize Bruno's unrealistic naivete. This boy is nine years old: what is our excuse? This fable extends beyond the Holocaust. We too are blind to the injustices around us, and Boyne's book chillingly depicts this.

Bruno's not so different from many who destroy others to protect themselves. Yet, despite his flaws, he's human enough to love, to reach out to another. He is ignorant of his effect on another reaching out for him; nevertheless, he reaches for the hand of one in need. In doing so, he sacrifices a part of himself.

This story alternates between being beautiful and unnerving. Despite the devasting ending, one knows this must be the result. When we take from others, we kill our own souls. I have recommended this book to everyone--even to those reluctant readers. It is unforgettable.