Boy In The Striped Pajamas Essay

When the full extent of the Holocaust became known after the end of World War II, the thought that its horror was too monstrous to write about in the fictional forms slipped into the conversations of intellectuals. Fiction implies maneuvers which seem trivial and inappropriate in the context of unprecedented. Putting the point simply, it is impossible to think of a novel that conveys the full effect of the Nazi genocide. The works such as Anne Frank's diary, Schindler's List, etc. are all factual. This renders a book like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ridiculous. It concerns an eight-year-old boy named Bruno whose career soldier father is placed in command of a concentration camp early in the war. The child is unaware of the camp's function. He thinks it is some kind of farm. All he knows is that he has no friends and no activities to divert him. He isn't even allowed to go to school, rather he is tutored at home by a Nazi functionary, while his mother denies what she knows is taking place in the camp. Eventually Bruno wanders through the woods, encounters the barbed wire and Shmuel, an inmate of his own age. He wonders why the boy always wears "pyjamas" (actually the striped prison uniform), thinks perhaps the numbers sewn on it are part of some fun game his pal is playing. His misapprehension is

Even when the gas chambers are fired up, smoke blackening the sky and stench filling their nostrils, they insist the camp is just burning some old clothes. The largest silence is Shmuel's, who never forthrightly explains his desperate circumstances to Bruno. Maybe he doesn't want to shock his new friend. More likely his true imprisonment is in the desperate manipulations of the movie, its need to keep everyone in a state of denial until Shmuel sneaks Bruno into the camp and toward a totally unexpected