The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 novel about Germans and the Holocaust, from the point of view of a young boy, written by Irish novelist John Boyne. Unlike the months of planning Boyne devoted to his other books, he said that he wrote the entire first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in two and a half days, barely sleeping until he got to the end. To date, the novel has sold more than 5 million copies around the world, and was published as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in the United States. In both 2007 and 2008 it was the best selling book of the year in Spain. It has also reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, as well as in the UK, Ireland, Australia and many other countries.
Controversy
The book is a novel: it is not historical fiction. The very premise of the book - that there would be a child of Shmuel's age - is, according to critics, an unacceptable fabrication that does not reflect the reality of life in the camps.
Rabbi Benjamin Blech condemned it: "This book is not just a lie and not just a fairytale, but a profanation." His chief complaint is that it supports the idea that ordinary people were unaware of the horrors of the Nazis' mass extermination of Jews. He argues that everyone for miles around could smell the stench of death and expresses doubt that the 8-year-old son of a Nazi official could be unaware of what a Jew is (or whether he himself is one).
He writes, "Note to the reader: There were no nine-year-old Jewish boys in Auschwitz -- the Nazis immediately gassed those not old enough to work. Also, the Auschwitz death camp was surrounded by electric fences, making any attempts to crawl in through a hole impossible." Such alleged falsification of history has important consequences, say Boyne's critics, for the way that the victims of the Holocaust might be remembered and commemorated, thus reviving arguments that were previously aired about Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and the manner in which that film sanitised and falsified aspects of the concentration camp experience too.
To get more information let's see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Striped_Pyjamas
Comment
You must be logged in to comment. Register to create an account.
