The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
By John Boyne
The boy in the striped pajamas is a book that goes through the things that happened in the German nationalsocialism in the World War II and the massive murders in the gas cameras of jews, all from the point of view of a 9 years old boy, son of an important nazi general in Auschwitz. (It's written like a fable)
From our point of view the book is perhaps, too ingenuous because it’s hard to believe that a boy of that age (whatever the time he lived) didn’t notice anything of what was happening around him. Is rare too that an educated boy under the German nazism hadn’t ever heard about jewish or anything about them...
The novel doesn’t obey very much to true historic facts; there weren’t any children in the concentration camps, they were gassed on arrival. The fences were usually electrified.
We found interesting the fact of how the book is written in the inocent voice of our protagonist Bruno, and the things that the author could obtain with this way of writing. The most shocking things are the horrible things that happen around Bruno that he doesn’t even realize about, but we understand really well. This resource is good too because it doesn’t get into the morbidity of the explicit things, but it gives it to understanding, and as our today society understands it, it keeps still being terrible.
It is interesting too how Boyne hits a few powerful notes, like Bruno’s father when he tells his son that the people inside the fence “aren’t people at all”, and his mother saying that “we don’t have the luxury of thinking”.
It’s great the dark ironic voice that takes the narrator in the last line: “[of] course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again”
It’s a good book to young readers too, because they can understand it easily and it could introduce them in this horrible part of our recent history of war in a kind of softer way than others book about the same topic.
Anyway we found that the book uses the ‘easy emotions’ in a short novel without any real literature contents, something that can be interpreted in an easy way of selling, by using the holocaust.
The most poetic and artistic scene (for us) is the one where Bruno and Shmuel (the jewish Bruno’s friend from inside the fences) die together, asphyxiated, inside the concentration camp, holding their hands in a true friendship, with the beauty and pure inocence over any stupid races ideology. Where two young children could understand better than all genocides, how the only thing that matters isn’t in the skin colour or nationality, but much deeper.
_.Micaela Stang, Gaby Negrete, Maya Szir.
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