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 PrintableVersion Shelf lifeLooking at secular booksTHE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS: A Fable I got into a conversation about this book on the train. It ran: ‘Strange title!’ ‘Its a children’s book.’ ... ‘What’s it about?’ ‘Well, the holocaust, really.’ ‘For children? Weird.’ Bruno is nine years old, living in a luxurious Berlin house, until page two, when he is told to help the maid with the packing, for they are moving. They are going to ‘Out-With’ as ‘the Fury’ wants father to do an important job there. The adult reader will understand the poignant miss-hearings straight away, but for my eight-year-old daughter things unfolded more slowly; indeed, she read the first three quarters as an adventure, excited about what would happen next and laughing at Bruno’s jokes, only slowly realising that the hundreds of ‘sons, fathers, grandfathers’ in striped pyjamas, who Bruno sees behind a fence and who Bruno’s father refers to as ‘not really people’, are the victims of Hitler’s Final Solution. Fable to the foreSo, one day, Bruno, fed up with endless history lessons and his ‘hopeless case’ sister, goes out exploring and through the fence meets Schmuel. At this point realism fades and ‘Fable’ comes to the fore, as we learn that Schmuel was born on the same day as Bruno. They swap stories, Bruno failing to understand what goes on behind the fence, and Schmuel silent in the face of Bruno’s naivete. And Bruno remains the innocent to the very end of the book, uncomprehending in chats with Schmuel, and in his own house, so that in the final chapter when he crawls under the wire he is shocked to find that there are no ‘happy families...rocking chairs...skipping and hopscotch’. Bruno, as it were, becomes his alter ego, putting on striped pyjamas and walking hand in hand with him to the same fate. So, is this a weird topic for a children’s story? Well, not really, as this best selling book stands in a line with plenty of children’s fiction about the Second World War (I am David, The Silver Sword, The Diary of Anne Frank, etc.). And perhaps stories with children at their centre can portray subjects of great pain in a fresh and moral way, avoiding the pitfalls of mawkishness or melodrama which adult fiction can fall into. Bruno’s failure to realise what is going on behind the fence allows the horrors to be conveyed with a moving irony and, for many children, their awareness is not far behind Bruno’s. Never again?I had to resist giving my daughter hints when she puzzled as to why the people were put in such a horrid place, so that she could come to her own discoveries, and I guess that is part of the book’s aim, to avoid a textbook list of horrors and let children see inside this period of history. This book is described by John Boyne as a ‘Fable’, so he has an explicit moral intent, I guess, to show the dangers of complicity, and the horrors of ethnic prejudice. Yet, in his closing statement, Boyne’s irony seems overwhelmingly pessimistic: ‘Of course, all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age’. This is a book full of compassion and sensitivity, but with no hope. Alongside such stories, our children need to hear about the heroes of the war who mirrored Christ in suffering with others, because they had a hope which lasts. Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - March 2006 |
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