The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

This book by Irishman John Boyne documents a short period in the life of a young boy, Bruno who moves to a place he knows only as Out-with. He is surprised when he looks out his bedroom window and discovers that behind the huge barbed wire fence, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people and all of them are wearing striped pyjamas. For Bruno, everything changed when the "Fury" (Fuhrer) came to dinner, since then his family has moved from Berlin to Out-with (Auschwitz), a place he thinks might be in Poland. Bruno wants to be an adventurer when he grows up and on one of his adventurers he meets a boy who is his age on the other side of the fence. His new friend astonishes him in many ways.

This book was heartbreaking, I read it in an afternoon. It's a reasonably short novel that could easily be read by a child but probably shouldn't be. It is written from Bruno's perspective and the lack of wider understanding he has about where he is and why Shmuel is so much thinner than him and has no change of pyjamas. His questions of his father, an army man never come to anything and he doesn't understand why his father refers to the people behind the fence as "not really people, not like you and me." Shmuel also has both a lot of information that Bruno does, but a lack of understanding about what it means and why things are this way.

This book seems to stand as a fable and at the same time a story of the beauty of innocence combined with the devastation of the capability of human evil. The story finishes with a sentence that forces you to confront your own reality in this day and age where fences like the one shared by Shmuel and Bruno exist all over the world.

Although there have been doubts that a 9-year-old son of a Nazi soldier would not know about the Holocaust or Hitler, the point of this book is not to show a 9-year-old's capabilities or understanding in any way but to combine the beauty of a young child's innocence with the horror of things like the Holocaust. I would highly recommend this book to all.