The boy in the striped pyjamas - is it just me or

[Themumsnot]

is it a pile of sentimental tosh masquerading as a meaningful exploration of the issue of German responsibility for the concentration camps while actually completely trivialising the issue?
I've just had to read it for book group and I have to say I have rarely felt so repulsed by a book.

www.historytoday.com/roger-moorhouse/berliners-holocaust

"Self-censorship, therefore, and an element of political and social conditioning played an important role in effectively silencing the civilian population. For many, the dominant reaction was to close their ears to what little they may have heard.

Even among those who might have been more receptive to the truth of the Holocaust a cowed silence was often the norm, for fear of invoking the wrath of the Nazi state and endangering their own lives, or those of their loved ones"

From that article - the crux of the matter I think

I did enjoy the book for what I thought it was - a story exploring friendship. I never took it as historically accurate. Although, the fact that children would read it at school alongside war projects is odd as it's not accurate.

How many small boys were allowed to while away the hours sitting down and chatting in auchwitz...?!

I think adults can be blind to reality but children haven't yet lost their innate integrity, so although I haven't read it yet, if the entire premise of this book is that a child was oblivious and innocent then I won't be able to take it seriously.

I've just read Room, and I thought that book was masterfully and powerfully written (through the eyes of a five year old) specifically because it shows that children see and understand more than adults give them credit for.

Surely although some children see and understand more than adults give them credit for, some children do not. The German boy in this book did not, and he could have been kept in the dark. Because, 70 years on, we don't think it entirely plausible, doesn't mean that such a situation couldn't have happened.

UK children will learn in school history that the majority of children in Auschwitz were killed immediately, and that there was forced labour, with no rest breaks, for the rest from 4am every day. But it doesn't stop this being a powerful story or less meaningful.

Exactly DandyDan

true, but perhaps the point here is that the character wasn't plausable to the people who have read the book, and this is more important than whether an actual boy would have thought like that.

'UK children will learn in school history that the majority of children in Auschwitz were killed immediately, and that there was forced labour, with no rest breaks, for the rest from 4am every day. But it doesn't stop this being a powerful story or less meaningful.'

It really does though. If the book is based on a lie then it does matter.

there are so many first-hand accounts of the terrible sufferings of the holocaust, I cannot really see why dc need to read a fictional non very realistic story about it in class. Perhaps the other books, of which there are so many, have details that primary school dc could not cope with? Boy in the striped.. does not detail what happens at the camp, does it? In the film they go inot the room, the door is closed and the lights go out.

In terms of what people may or may not have known, I think we will never get an answer to that. When I taught English to my group of old fogies in Berlin, they told me differing accounts but along the lines that they knew whatever was happening to the Jews in the East was not good (since what was happening to them in Germany itself was already drastic) but they did not know exactly what was happening; and I had an old man born 1934 in my class who said anyone born when he was or before knew everything essentially and not to believe them if they told me otherwise. So who knows?

Have just read a book by a Jewish man who spent the war years in one of those Adolf Hitler elite schools were they trimmed the future SS leadership. It is quite a remarkable book/story since he was really in the lion's den. He was arrested by the German army in the East somewhere and told them when they asked if he was Jewish that he was an ethnic German which they believed, they took him in as a kind of mascot to the front and later he was sent to Germany and to this school by an army officer who planned to adopt him. And it is a true story despite sounding quite incredible.

It is not a book appropriate for primary since he discusses trying to stretch his foreskin so as not to be detected in the showers and mentions though does not detail sex in a train carriage, couple of episodes like that. I think it is a good book for KS3 and has been made into a film which I have not seen.

The book doesn't discuss the details of the holocaust and what is interesting is that the author says that he had not heard about the holocaust at this school despite having an obvious interest in knowing what the fate of the Jews was.Having escaped a mass shooting by the skin of his teeth , he had an idea but had not heard it seems about the gas chambers in the camps. He does go to Lodz where his family are trapped in the ghetto and travels through on the bus in his Hitler youth uniform hoping to catch sight of his parents who by then ar probably already dead.

here

I've seen the film and I didn't think it was sentimental at all - in fact it's probably one of the most horrific films I've seen IMO - though a good film.

I can't think of anything else I've seen which brought home the banality of evil so well.

Aus-mit/Auschwitz is vaguely plausible, The Fury/Die Wut isn't...

I found it very predictable and there are better books out there dealing with WWII/the Holocaust for children.

I read it, having no idea what to expect and I thought it was very good as a child's book. It showed the whole futility of it-from the child's eyes it didn't make any sense-and it didn't. There are better books at dealing with WWII/the Holocaust for children but there is room for them all and it was a very different approach.

I totally agree with the OP. It was on the suggested reading list for DD in yr6, I read it when she brought it home as I thought it was meant to be a good book. It wasn't. The language is banal, the viewpoint avoids the real suffering of Shmuel, Bruno isn't a convincing portrait... yes, 'repulsed' is about right.

yes, see your point; but if they read just one book about it, is that the one to read IYSWIM? Just had a google and found this list:

books about the holocaust

stories about the holocaust, written for children (most of which I don't know)

sorry, was referring to exoticfruit..

I dislike books where you can never shake the feeling that things are only happening because the author has decided they will happen. TBINSP was one of these for me. I could never suspend my disbelief properly because the author just wouldn't stop pushing emotional buttons. The subject matter is weighty enough that it shouldn't need that kind of treatment to be affecting.

I think that it is a good starting point for a child, they can take from it what they want and then go on to find out more-I'm not sure how much I could have taken as a child. It is a child's book and people are looking at it from a adult's perspective.

Some readers find it implausible, others find that the storyline is acceptable.

"if they read just one book about it" - why should this point be part of the argument against it? WE don't say "if people read one book about WW1, then Birdsong should be it".

Personally I don't think it's the greatest book written for children about the Holocaust - I don't think one book can fill that brief. I have others I prefer to read, but despite some of the contrivance of this story, I think it is a valid addition to the lists of books on this subject. As the above post mentions, it is a good starting point. Children should/may/might/will read more than one book about the Holocaust.

As for telling lies about truthful things in fiction, fiction is just that - fiction. It is not going to tell the truth always like a video or a series of photos even - it is going to tell it in these ways but also inother ways. It will tell 'truth' in more indirect ways than i-dotting verisimilitude. Many books set in historical periods take some liberties with exactitude and I don't think this subject should be a special case, where the book can be damned for not getting it "exactly as it was". The literal truth of the Auschwitz horrors do not have to be represented literally and fully in every single artistic work that attempts to convey something about them or speaks of them.

I don't think anyone should ever read 'just one book' about something.
I think that this book is a good starting point for a child.

a primary school class is unlikely to have time in the school curriculum to read more than one book about the holocaust in a year. If thy read this one, they aren't reading a better one. Why choose this one when there are better ones out there. (referring to mention of year 5 class)

For an adult book group like OPs it is a different situation

I really don't understand why yr5 teachers choose it when it explicitly says its about 9 year olds but not for 9 year olds.

Apart from the unspoken horror (which may be lost on them if not spelled out, which rather defeats the point), there's the subplot of the sergeant lusting after the teenage sister while shagging the mother.

I'm with the OP. Haven't read the book but saw the film with DD age 12 and DH this w/e, because DD had heard how good it was from a classmate. Interestingly her tutor, who is also head of history, had commented that the book was not based on research and not accurate.

Basically a very contrived story about a family, all with posh english accents in the film(!) but german, with a bit of holocaust thrown in to make the plotline work. I couldn't bear the fact that the horrendous ending - a 'watchable/sanitised' version of going to the gas chamber!!! - was simply to give the required plot twist. Ah - Bruno the boy in the striped pyjamas!

But - we had insisted on watching it with DD and it gave us alot to talk about. DD also found it crass. So if watched with a critical eye...

I think the Morris Gleishmann (sp?) books, and I am David, have far more depth and are more appropriate.

I remember reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit at that age and relating well.

It will be suitable for some children but not all.

Turns out DH has got to go away this week so I can't make it to book group after all. Possibly just as well...
I think part of the problem is that I believe as a writer you should hold yourself to equally high standards of integrity when writing for children as when writing for adults. Really good children's writers do. I didn't find I had an emotional connection with this book at all. It didn't move me; the characters were two-dimensional and the so-called surprise ending was so contrived and so clearly signalled that it didn't call up any emotional response at all. Children deserve better IMO. In a way it was like reading Jodi Picolt - a plot that is deliberately set up to be "controversial" and push the reader's emotional buttons, but actually fails to do that because of the cynicism with which it is done.

it makes me uneasy too although I could not have expressed it as well as you do. (Just going on the film, haven't read the book so don't know what the tone of it is)