A Child's Eye View

• Date: 06.12.2007
• Book: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Isis General Fiction)
• Author: TCRH

Review

Told through the eyes of a nine year old child this is a moving portrayal of the friendship of two boys set against a backdrop of almost unimagineable evil.

Bruno is uprooted from Berlin because of his father's job and is homesick and alone. Then he meets Shmuel and a curious friendship develops. Curious because the two boys are seperated by a fence. Bruno, son of the SS Kommandant of Auschwitz is on one side, Shmuel, incarcerated because he is Jewish is on the other.

Bruno is unaware of what the camp represents. From his bedroom window he sees only a city behind a fence where everyone wears the same striped pyjamas. He even envies Shmuel that he has other children to play with.

Shmuel, mourning his own innocence, is unwilling or unable to tell Bruno the truth about what his happening. Eventually Bruno's curiousity and Shmuel's quiet desperation will lead them both to an abyss where evil rules over innocents.

This is a moving and touching story: an extraordinary new take on an historical event that demands we revisit it.

Should we suspend our disbelief that the son of a high ranking official knows nothing of the doctrine of Nazism? Perhaps, but that is a small complaint.

Boyne furnishes us with a believable take on childhood and friendship. And, through the eyes of a child, we are treated to more than the normal evil Nazi portrait of an SS man. Bruno's father is a devoted family man. Should this surprise us: perhaps the sheer scale of the process of extermination and the virulence of Nazi propaganda had dehumanised the perpetrators. And Rudolph Hoess, who masterminded the killing machine at Auschwitz, lived a normal family life only yards away from the gas chambers he presided over.

That is just one of the questions that the book raises for adult readers. But this book, subtitled 'A Fable,' is also aimed at children. This caused some consternation when the book was published: are we, 60 years after the event, to expose our children's innocence to the horrors of the Holocaust?

It is natural to want to protect children. But to hide and cosset them from reality is not protecting them. It is our duty to remember the victims and inform future generations: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”