The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne Review: Innocence at the Auschwitz Fence

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a historical novel by Irish author John Boyne, originally published in 2006 and reprinted in this David Fickling Books paperback edition dated October 23, 2007. It follows Bruno, a nine-year-old German boy whose father is appointed Commandant of Auschwitz, forcing the family to leave Berlin and relocate to a house beside the camp. Lonely and with no one to play with, Bruno explores along the fence and meets Shmuel, a Jewish boy his own age imprisoned on the other side. The two talk through the wire almost every day, and a friendship forms between a child who does not understand what the camp is and a child living inside it. Bruno reads Shmuel's striped uniform as pajamas and the camp as a farm, and his incomprehension drives the novel toward its well-known tragic conclusion, in which Bruno crosses to Shmuel's side of the fence. Boyne has described the book as a fable, and it is structured around that conceit: the horror is kept at the edge of a child's field of vision.

Few Holocaust novels of the past two decades have reached as many readers. According to Boyne's own site, the book won the Irish Book Award for Children's Book of the Year, the People's Choice Book of the Year, the Bisto Book of the Year, and Spain's Que Leer Award for Best International Novel, and was shortlisted for more than a dozen other prizes including the Deutschen Jugendliteraturpreis in Germany. The novel was adapted into a 2008 feature film and has become a fixture of middle-school and early-secondary classrooms; this edition carries a Young Reader's Choice Award (Intermediate Division) designation and is pitched by the publisher at grades seven through nine, with customer-suggested reading ages from nine up. Reader engagement is enormous, and the book functions for many families as a first encounter with Holocaust fiction — a role its defenders and critics both take seriously.

The novel's central device — filtering industrialized atrocity through a narrator too young to name it — gives the book its force. Bruno's immediate worries (his missing friends, his sister, the view from his window) sit in the foreground while the camp looms uncomprehended behind them, and that gap between what Bruno sees and what the reader knows supplies the dread. One blogger at jodilmilner.com found that choice convincing, writing that Bruno's reactions are realistic for a young child and praising Boyne's writing style as well fitted to the premise, while also noting the book is short, moves quickly, and does not dwell on graphic cruelty — qualities that reader recommended for introducing the subject gradually to an interested child. The friendship itself, conducted in near-daily conversations at the fence, dramatizes connection forming across a division neither boy fully understands, and the ending refuses the survival-and-redemption arc some readers bring to Holocaust stories: as that same reviewer put it, the book delivers not a story of survival against the odds but a tragedy about a boy punished for being a good friend.

The criticism of this novel is substantial and should not be waved away. Detractors argue that the premise collapses under the mildest historical scrutiny: a nine-year-old at Auschwitz would, as readers have pointed out, most likely have been sent to the gas chambers on arrival, and Bruno's total ignorance of Jews, the camp, and even the word for his own situation strikes many as implausible rather than innocent. In a representative negative review, one blogger described struggling to sympathize with Bruno as "just too dense" and reported feeling manipulated as a reader, faulting the book for coyly withholding its subject and for what she judged to be thin execution. That line of complaint — echoed by educators and Holocaust educators who worry the fable substitutes sentiment for history — means the book works best as a starting point for discussion rather than a final word, and readers seeking documentary accuracy should pair it with testimony or history.

At roughly 215 pages in this edition, this is a fast, accessible read aimed at upper-middle-grade and young teen readers, and it remains one of the most common gateways into Holocaust literature for that audience. It suits readers and classrooms prepared to talk about what the fable simplifies, and parents should know the ending is genuinely devastating rather than redemptive. Readers who prioritize historical precision in Holocaust fiction will find the implausibilities grating; readers who respond to moral fable and child-perspective narration will understand why it has been so widely awarded and so widely read.