The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne is a heartrending story of the holocaust blithely told from the naive perspective of a young German boy who reluctantly relocates with his family from their mansion in Berlin to the bucolic farm town of "Out-With" when his father is appointed by the "Fury" as the new commandant of the infamous Nazi death camp.

Irish novelist John Boyne has created a poignant fable full of subtle ironies, conspicuous symbolism, and disconcerting juxtapositions of good and evil. The inhumanity and brutal efficiency of the Nazi death camp is tragically brought home to the new commandant when his inquisitive son Bruno while out exploring befriends a lonely Jewish boy in “striped pajamas” who sits cross-legged each day at the fence surrounding Out-With (Bruno’s pronunciation of Auschwitz). Although separated by a barbed wire fence the boys hatch a furtive plan for Bruno to exchange his clothes for striped prisoner garb, squeeze under the loose fence, and join Shmuel to help find his missing father who hasn't been seen in three days.

Obliviously, the boy's quixotic quest goes tragically awry and their fateful friendship unexpectedly becomes eternal when Bruno and Shmuel suddenly find themselves trapped in a clot of prisoners being herded into a stark air-tight windowless bunker apparently to escape the pouring rain. The sad story climaxes with the distraught commandant searching frantically for his beloved son when he stumbles upon Bruno's discarded wet clothes and mud-caked boots. Perplexed he looks down to see the slack fence when in horror it dawns on him what the "final solution” of the "Fury" has woefully wrought in Germany as acrid smoking ash rises ominously from the camp's overworked chimneys. The author caps his disturbing parable with this sardonic admonition: "Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age" Let's all pray he is right!

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Created Jan 03, 2009 at 3:43pm • Submit your own review...