Book #13

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
by John Boyne


Nope, it wasn't the best choice. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was left in my classroom over the summer; it's an award winning children's book, so I tried reading it sometime in September during class. I was immediately intrigued because it gives absolutely no information on the jacket -- it says it's about a young boy and a fence, and hopes that the reader never has to deal with a fence like that. So I started reading it while trying to get my lame students to read silently in class, and within the first few chapters I got that it was a nine-year-old named Bruno who lived in Berlin, and whose father had some military job. Then it made some mention of the Fury coming over for dinner, and it took me a few repetitions before I got it: Fuhrer. As in Adolph Hitler. The father gets transferred to a job with great big responsibility, to some place the kid and his sister call Out-With. Yeah: in German that would be Aus, and Mit. A kid's version of Auschwitz.

So I wanted to read the book since then, and it's been sitting next to my computer at school, just winking at me. Well, then I finished Maltese right before going to school, and I had a book to read with class -- but then I saw this one, and I just couldn't turn it down this time. So I read it.

It was very good. The author did a wonderful job of portraying the Holocaust from a kid's point of view, the son of the Auschwitz camp Commandant. He showed not only how ridiculous the whole thing was, how obscenely illogical and foolish, and thus showed that once you got out of the propaganda and furor and hoopla, the whole thing just falls apart. There's a great scene when the kid falls and hurts himself, and the inmate who cuts up the vegetables for the family's dinner is the only one home; he comes running out and picks up the kid and cleans up his cut, and does a great job. And you know the whole time that this man is a Jew serving in the household of a Nazi, and could easily be forgiven for letting the kid suffer until his Aryan mother comes home. But he doesn't. And when the kid, hoping for a good story and maybe some pity, says that he thinks he needs to go to the doctor, the man says he'll be fine -- and he knows because he was a doctor. It makes you love and hate humanity, at the same time.

Of course, this is not, as you can imagine, a happy book, and it was probably not the best choice to follow on the heels of Dashiell Hammett's little fun fest. Here's the thing: as evil as the ending of the Maltese Falcon was, this one is worse. And as evil as you might imagine the ending of this book is, it's worse. As bleak as you could wish for, in a book for children about the Holocaust.

So next I'm reading something happy, damnit. Come hell or high water.