The Book That Shaped My World: 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'

by Dulcie Langley

The novel that has most shaped my life is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. I studied it in Year 5, so the book is not necessarily as challenging or impressive in the calibre of language. However, I believe the effect of this is what seals the potency of the story.

I think the answer to what makes the book so viciously compelling lies in the naive and whimsical nature of the narrative. We hear from a child who is untainted and uncorrupted, attempting to digest the darkest aspects of humanity when it has not yet occurred to them that such inhumanity can exist. 

The story is told through the lens of nine year boy Bruno, living in Nazi Germany. Bruno comes home one day in 1943 to discover his belongings packed and set near the door. Someone called ‘The Fury’ has instructed the family to relocate from Berlin, to a place Bruno refers to as Out-With. With the benefit of hindsight and maturity we can interpret that Bruno’s father, a Nazi commandant, will in fact be in charge of the prison camp Auschwitz, under the Führer Adolf Hitler’s orders. 

When they move, Bruno despises his new home as he is allowed to do very little exploring. He is puzzled about why he is separated from thousands of people by a high fence. He wants to go and play with the children on the other side of it and crucially he wants to know why everyone on the other side wears striped pyjamas.

Eventually, Bruno finds himself so lonely that he can't resist the urge to go and meet some of the boys on the other side of the fence. He befriends a boy called Schmuel and an unlikely bond forms. This is the basis of the plot, these two boys navigating their feelings towards each other and their situation, trying to gain an understanding of why they should be segregated and why they are ostensibly different.

Reading the book with hindsight is indeed painful as we know what Bruno was in fact seeing. However, reading the book now as an older person is even more painful perhaps. It is gut-wrenching to witness the purity of the child so starkly contrasted with the Nazi father’s heartlessness, bringing the horror of the holocaust into focus through innocent eyes. The fact that concepts underpinned by such evil and dividing hatred are not understood by the child, and that he can’t comprehend the reasoning behind the constructed separation, is deeply saddening and touching. 

 The book exhibits that Bruno, as someone not yet fully indoctrinated into the Nazi ideology, doesn’t recognise the superficial labels that seemingly should create a disparity between those behind the fence and him. There is no rational explanation to him for the split he witnesses. 

This poignant idea is what really stuck with me at age ten and still resonates with me now. The book is this gentle voice simplistically explaining immorality so unthinkable that adult voices can scarcely fathom it now - this is greatly disturbing.
The novel ignited my passion for human rights and history, which I remain incredibly passionate about. Much of my reading centres around these topics now. Since reading this book, my eyes have been opened to wider events of mass cruelty, such as Cambodian genocide and the concentration camps that still operate in North Korea. I wrote an article for this week’s school blog about these. They mirror, if not outshine, the injustice of Nazi labour camps and yet the West fails to intervene. The recent egregious murder of George Floyd further reaffirms this concept of hatred being artificially cultivated. 

What is significant to me when I revisit this book is knowing that we are not a fully reformed world. Prejudices are still present in our global society, some implicit and some explicit, and I think addressing the atrocities of Hitler in a reflective attitude that allows us to put distance between us and them is dangerous. Hatred for other people isn’t an expired notion that we can only look back on in history books - it’s here now. We need an understanding that poisonous values like those of Nazi Germany have not been entirely extirpated from our community. We need to realise that the depravity displayed in the World Wars is not something we have fully left behind. The message of this book is ultimately that hatred is something we are taught rather than something we inherit, and that message is timeless.

Novels to read this summer:

Modern - Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
The honest portrayal of British women and their lives appeals to me. The book was the joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019. Waterstones describes the novel as ‘a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood’, which definitely encourages me to read it. PGS Lit Soc also recommends this book!

Classic - Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
I have wanted to read this book for a while. Hardy addresses beliefs about marriage and women’s rights within the novel and this greatly intrigues me.