The boy in the striped pyjamas

[octopusrus]

Could anyone help by telling me if this is suitable for Y6? They have been advised to read by their teacher but I haven't read it myself yet and wasn't sure if it would be too upsetting?

[gamerchick]

Mine watched the film at school. What about starting there?

Personally I think young minds absorb the past better than us. They are our future leaders and need to learn about the past so they don't repeat it.

[highlandcoo]

It's not graphic, OP. It's told through the eyes of a child. So as adults, knowing the horror that lay behind what the young boy describes, we can envisage the awful reality. I don't think Y6 children would do that to the same extent if that makes sense.

[pollyhemlock]

I wouldn’t recommend it for Year 6 myself. Not just because of the content, which is obviously upsetting, but because the double perspective- what the child in the book sees and understands is not what is actually happening- is quite a sophisticated concept which many Year 6 children won’t grasp yet. However my personal dislike of this book may be affecting my judgment here. If they are learning about this period I would suggest Morris Gleitzman’s Once as an alternative (though the sequel, Then, has an extremely harrowing scene at the end).

[octopusrus]

Thanks so much for your insight, I think he'll be ok with it from what you've said. Much appreciated.

[mumsiedarlingrevolta]

DS read it at about that age -

he said to me "please mum can you read the last bit as I think I must have misunderstood the ending"

Broke my heart and his but I wouldn't have stopped him reading it

[Wetcarparkrain]

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit a great book for this age/topic, and I was mesmerised by The Silver Sword. Also Carrie’s War and Goodnight Mister Tom.

[SJaneS48]

My 11 year old has read it recently - was a bit concerned about how she’d deal with the ending but actually it led to lots of questions from her about the Nazi’s, why one race could hate another etc. When we were at the Imperial War Museum at half term we did go to the Holocaust exhibition. While she wasn’t interested in all the detailed detail (and to be honest I did rush her through it a bit), she was touched by seeing the pajama’s behind the glass.

[Portulaca]

The Holocaust is a very difficult topic to broach with children. It's knowing when to do it, and get it right, so that children understand and are not either bored (because they don't understand) or traumatised because they do understand but aren't ready emotionally to handle it.

I think Judith Kerr's series of autiographical books beginning with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit are a good introduction, and then gently move on to Anne Frank's Diary. I'm undecided about The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas being suitable or not. I think there are better books out there to help understand what happened.

[LambriniSocialist]

No, it's shite. The ending particularly pissed me off so much!

holocaustlearning.org.uk/latest/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/

I don't get why it's so popular?

[Marriedtoapenguin]

There's a lot of issues with the book but as I wouldn't expect year 6 kids to have any real idea of the subject matter, it's a good starting point.

Every child should be made aware of the horror of the Nazi regime but there's a way to do it.

[SJaneS48]

As a novel based on the Holocaust, The Tattooist of Auschwitz annoyed me far more tbh with the central character fondly remembering the ‘long summer days’ with his girlfriend, in a death camp...

[Sprigware]

Holocaust survivor organisations have consistently condemned the book as promoting dangerous myths and inaccuracies about the death camps — Schmuel would have been gassed as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz, while the Aryan protagonist is completely ignorant about the war andNazism, despite the fact that a real 9 year old son of a high-ranking Nazi and concentration camp governor would have had to be in the Hitler Youth and would have been at a school where students swore daily oaths to Hitler, were taught to take pride in the Reich and fed anti-Semitic propaganda — and for depicting Jewish camp inmates as passive and unresisting, and for directing the reader’s sympathy towards the ‘Aryan child who shouldn’t have been in the gas chamber’, when in fact, none of the millions of people murdered ‘should have been’ in the camps.

[Neighneigh]

As others have said, there's a lot wrong with the book and there are far better ones, like When Hitler Stole... The main issue for me is how we are so shocked at the end yet not shocked that it was happening day in day out (that's a massively simplistic version, I'm knackered). There was a thread on here not long ago which went in to it, but @Sprigware says, it's widely condemned and I'd do some research & talk it through properly

[TheReluctantCountess]

It’s fine for year six, but it’s not very good.

[bookworm14]

What sprigware said. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.