This seems to be a love it or hate it book, but I'm not sure where I stand...

I found it slow going to start with, then once Shmuel appeared I was compelled to keep reading. I don't have any problems accepting that it's supposed to be a fable rather than a historically accurate account of the Holocaust, but while Bruno's obliviousness initially came across as innocence, it became increasingly difficult to believe that a child of nine wouldn't twig that there was something awful going on. His failure to develop or learn made it a less than satisfying read and I was unmoved by his fate.

The writing style also annoyed me a bit at first - I lost count of how many times someone's mouth formed "the shape of an O", and the continued mispronunciation "Out-With" was unbelievable - this would be way more difficult for a German child to pronounce than "Auschwitz."

I also wasn't sure who the book is aimed at - the blurb (obviously not the author's fault) seemed very condescending, and yet said it wasn't for nine-year-olds, implying an older target audience.

I'm glad I read it though - it's a very "discussable" book and I admire the author's decision to use the POV of an inherently unsympathetic character.

Caro, this is Linda Grant's take on the film, though not the book. You might be interested in reading it. She is, of course, Jewish.
How can they understand?
A new film about the Holocaust, aimed at children, represents the Disneyfication of the Final Solution. Can the horrors of the Nazis ever make great cinema? By Linda Grant


Linda Grant
The Guardian, Friday August 29 2008
Article history

'Both cinema and literature have struggled making art from the Holocaust' ... The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday September 5 2008

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Release: 2008
Country: Rest of the world
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 94 mins
Directors: Mark Herman
Cast: Asa Butterfield, David Heyman, David Thewlis, Jim Norton, Richard Johnson, Rupert Friend, Sheila Hancock, Vera Farmiga
More on this film
The article below contained some errors. We were wrong to say that Claude Lanzmann's Shoah fell back on newsreel footage; it didn't use any. Life is Beautiful was released in the UK in 1999, but it was first released in Italy in 1997. The article suggested that Fateless, the film of Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness, was never on general release in Britain, but Dogwoof distributed the film in the UK in May 2006. It played in over a hundred cinemas and was critic Philip French's film of the week in the Observer on May 7 that year. We have corrected all of these errors in the text.

After the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz won the Nobel prize for literature in 2002, his little-known 1975 novel Fatelessness, about his own childhood deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was filmed, with a script by Kertesz himself. Although it lacked the book's eerie meditations on the nature of fate and personal responsibility it made a disturbing and unsettling film. The narrator speaks of his "favourite time" of day in the concentration camp, and when he finally returns home to Budapest and a fractured family, he seems almost nostalgic for the recent past. A man on a tram asks him whether he saw the gas chambers with his own eyes, prefiguring the denial that was to come.

I saw the film at the Jewish film festival in London a couple of years ago. Any faint mark it made will soon be obliterated by a new film about the death camps, a Miramax/Disney production of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a bestselling children's book published in 2006.


Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter
Both cinema and literature have struggled making art from the Holocaust. It is only in the past 15 years that mainstream cinema has regarded the events as sufficiently distant in time to constitute entertainment. In the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the camps, artists understood that they had nothing to offer that could better straightforward documentary realism. The photographer George Rodger, who covered the liberation of Belsen, noticed that in pointing his camera at the piles of emaciated corpses he was artistically framing his shot. He put the camera down and resolved never to cover war again. From the 1950s onwards, the gold standard account of the camps was Primo Levi's memoir, If This Is a Man.

In Europe, Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) both wrestled with the Holocaust, but Resnais' film fell back on newsreel footage. Only Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) attempted inexpertly to explore the themes of guilt and complicity. It was Hollywood - with the exception of Steven Spielberg - that for decades ignored the Holocaust, the very town that antisemites were always complaining was controlled by Jews.


Life is Beautiful
Child-centred depictions of the Final Solution, such as Roberto Benigni's comedy Life Is Beautiful (1997), coat a veneer of sweetness over a horror that you can't get too close to without being personally scorched. A million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis, but it is the very innocence of children that sentimentalises the subject, and draws the mind away from the moral complexity of the many questions the Final Solution raises. Pimps, prostitutes, adulterers, thieves, embezzlers and the more mildly and mundanely unpleasant went into the gas chambers, as well as the concert pianists and the talented teenage writers. We don't get any films about them.

I saw a press screening of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas earlier this month. The critics sat in stunned silence at the end and some were still there when the credits had finished rolling. It is impossible to write about the film's impact without the final spoiler. It relates the story of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commander of an Auschwitz-like death camp, who is removed from his comfortable Berlin home, where he and his friends run around the streets, arms spread, playing Luftwaffe pilots. Relocated to a house in the countryside on the edge of what he first believes to be a large farm, he is deprived of friends to play with and defies his parents' express orders, haring off through the woods where he comes up short against a barbed wire fence and Shmuel, a boy his own age on the other side, thin, miserable and wearing striped pyjamas.

Over several months the boys become friends, in a static sort of way, talking through the wire. At home, there is Nazi ideology for breakfast, dinner and tea, and a sister with pin-ups of Hitler on the wall, mooning over a blond Aryan lieutenant. A Jewish servant in the house, who lives in the camp, gets bludgeoned to death when he accidentally knocks a glass of red wine on a snowy tablecloth. Shmuel is sent in to clean wine glasses for a party. Bruno gives him a piece of cake. The cruel lieutenant accuses Shmuel of stealing it. Bruno is too frightened of him to disagree. But then he peers over the staircase at a screening of a propaganda film about the camp - life is lovely in there, so Shmuel can't be that hungry.

Eventually Bruno accepts Shmuel's invitation to go on an adventure beyond the fence. Changing into striped pyjamas, he burrows under the wire and they run about a bit, until Bruno asks to go the cafeteria he's seen in his father's propaganda film. But before he can scamper back home, there is a selection. An entire hut is herded into the gas chamber. The two boys die, holding hands as Bruno's father, arriving too late, screams in the rain outside.

Is any of this plausible? The book describes itself, under the title, as a parable, and John Boyne - who wrote the source novel and worked on the screenplay - appends the obligatory device of enlarging its meaning so we are to view it as a warning about what is happening today. Is the fence of the book analogous to Israel's "separation barrier"? It's easy for parents and teachers to draw attention to the connection if they so wish. Critics were complimentary about Boyne's novel but one children's writer expressed concerns: "I simply didn't believe in the innocence of the hero," she told me. "There is no way the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer wouldn't know at least something of what was going on in Berlin and later on in the camp. I didn't buy Shmuel's ignorance about the fate of the camp's inmates."

When I watched the film, my attention was drawn away from the unintentional death of the innocent Nazi child in the gas chamber to the extras without speaking parts, the grown-up men and women standing around him. The enforced identification with Bruno as an innocent victim of a taste for exciting adventures left a sour taste in my mouth. He isn't in the camp long enough for him to be lost, swallowed up inside the system. At the point of death, he still thinks they're sheltering from the rain. Nothing at all disturbs his innocence. The true horror would have been the child's gradual starvation, the narrow moral choices open to the camp inmates, reduced to stealing a smaller child's spoon to eat and live. He has a mercifully quick death.

The film begins as a glossy, teatime BBC drama serial, with vintage motors and smart 1940s hats, but it ends in a very unexpected place for Holocaust films, with no happy ending. I can think of no other Holocaust film that takes you inside the gas chamber without the narrow escape for its about-to-be murdered inhabitants. But during the rest of the film, the camp is largely peripheral to the main action. Equally implausibly, Bruno's grandmother is a dissident. His mother, when she understands what is taking place on the other side of the fence, becomes distraught and wants to take the children back to Berlin. We can read her moral position on her face: she stops wearing lipstick.

This is a Hollywood version of the Holocaust, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is literally a Disneyfication (you wonder whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris). When you make films about the Final Solution for children there's not much you can say other than to introduce the historical events in a palatable way, and to make a general lesson about being nice to other people. When The Diary of Anne Frank was adapted for the stage in the 1950s, it was with the intention of suppressing the specifically Jewish element of the story to make it "universal".

Imre Kertész shocked interviewers by saying he felt lucky to have been in Auschwitz: "I experienced my most radical moments of happiness in the concentration camp. You cannot imagine what it's like to be allowed to lie in the camp's hospital, or to have a 10-minute break from indescribable labour. To be very close to death is also a kind of happiness. Just surviving becomes the greatest freedom of all." The true lessons of the Holocaust remain with us today, largely unexplored, buried beneath hypocrisy and our own perpetual naivety about the nature and consequences of suffering. When Kertész went on his first visit to Israel, watching tanks roll into the West Bank, he remarked, "I'd rather the star was on the tank than on my chest." We are ourselves too childlike to understand much of the great opaque experience of the Final Solution, with only occasional windows breaking through the stone walls of history. How can we expect children to understand what we do not?

Since the article includes the ending it should include a SPOILER warning.

I think it assumes we know how the Holocaust ended!

Thanks, Jem - that's really interesting. It sounds as though the film has kept fairly close to the book, though the book doesn't really show Bruno being indoctrinated by Nazi ideology - he doesn't even seem to grasp who Hitler is.

Nothing at all disturbs his innocence.

That was my main difficulty with it really. I would have found it much more moving and unsettling if Bruno had gradually gained awareness of the horrors and his own family's part in them.

I think it assumes we know how the Holocaust ended!

I mean how the book ends.

I read the book quite recently, and I agree: You don't buy the boy's innocence.

I know there are deliberately gaps left in the book that the reader is meant to fill in, but they irritated me, too. It was meant to be more horrific if the reader was left to fill in the gas in the narrative with their imagination, but I just thought it was a bit of a cop-out.