From: Ruth I. Gordon <Druthgo>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 15:41:45 -0700

Another country heard from, re: Barbara Genco.

Author: BOYNE Title: THE BOY IN STRIPED PAJAMAS Publisher: Fickling--released by Random House Date: 2006 Pages:
         Annotation: At a time when memories of the Holocaust (W.W. II in Europe) are fading and research has demonstrated that the subject is poorly taught, if at all, in England and the U.S., Boyne?s book comes as a slap in the face of history and the victims of those obscene events. It is styled as a ?fable,? defined in a dictionary as ?A narration intended to enforce a useful truth?. What is the truth that this hopes to convey: That a nine-year-old boy, Bruno, son of a high ranking S.S. officer, commandant of Auschwitz, would not know that the Fuhrer?s title is not ?The Fury;? that Auschwitz is not
?out-with;? that he is living in a house with a full view of the barbed wire (and electrified) fences surrounding the place; that the many people he sees in ?striped pajamas? are not there on holiday? Or are the terms he uses merely ?cutisms? to show how innocent he is? After all, so many Germans and their allies also proclaimed their innocence.

In his boredom and loneliness and his nostalgia for his home and friends in Berlin, Bruno hikes the area outside the fence at great length. He comes upon a thin striped pajama clad boy of his own age within the fence and they begin a relationship of sorts. The boy, Shmuel, a Polish Jewish prisoner--although we are not told that he is Jewish--interests Bruno who sometimes brings him food--if he remembers not to eat it. Eventually, Bruno, in striped pajamas supplied by Shmuel (and where did he acquire them? From a corpse?) slides under the fence and joins Shmuel but they both are sent to the
?showers? and then, one must presume, the ovens.

There are many questions that Boyne does not answer and which can be answered only by a knowledgeable person, of whom there seem fewer and fewer. (Is this a book about which we must say, ?Read only with a knowledgeable adult ??) Item: Some of the questions about the morality of Auschwitz will have no answers because such total evil provides none, but the book does not even try. Item: Children were among the first sent to death. Item: What person would be allowed to wander about and find an empty place away from the thousands of other prisoners? Item: If Bruno could crawl under the fence, wouldn?t others have attempted to escape, too? Item: Why are there no notes indicating what ?out-with? and ?the Fury? are? Item: What happens to Pavel, the kindly prisoner who works in the family?s kitchen? Item: Why was the smug and handsome Lieutenant sent away? Was he having an affair with Bruno?s mother? He is the only character who is so arrogant and cruel as to be off-putting. Were there no others as cruel as he in that hell? Item: Is Bruno?s father cruel or merely a preoccupied banal face of evil? Item: Why were all those people in striped pajamas there? What are striped pajamas? What do they indicate? (Prisoners wore these demeaning rags to further dehumanize them.) Item: How can we accept such trivialization of genocide? Item: Why is this called ?A Fable?? If so, what is the ?useful truth? to be learned? Or is it a fantasy about which this reader cannot suspend disbelief because these unbelievable events did occur to millions of people? Item: For whom is the narration intended? Item, the last: Why is such a misleading and untruthful book being released fifty years after the liberation of the camps when memories are fading and knowledge of those times weakening into ignorance and denial?

--Ruth I. Gordon, A.M., M.L.S., Ph.D. School librarian, retired

Note: The author has appended an introduction in the U.S. edition. It clears up nothing and is, no doubt, addended to cofferdam complaints about lack of explanation (as above)
Received on Wed 19 Apr 2006 05:41:45 PM CDT