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Lest we forget!

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS is an allegory or a fable told in strong yet austere and achingly simple prose through the eyes of a naïve nine year old boy who wants nothing more than to find a friend to talk to.

When Adolf Hitler promotes Bruno's father, a senior Wehrmacht officer, to the position of commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Bruno and his entire family find themselves moved from their pleasant, gentrified life and social circle of friends in Berlin to a lonely and isolated home in Poland just outside the barbed wire of the camp itself. Bruno, despite any real knowledge of what his father does for a living has unquestioning faith in his father's good intentions and respect for the authority of his orders. So, for some time, Bruno quietly goes about his business and undertakes his schooling with his sister from a private tutor. But a nine year old boy needs friends and company and, in lonely frustration, Bruno finally decides to explore the countryside outside of the fence surrounding the camp.

When Bruno meets Shmuel, a young boy wearing blue and white striped pajamas and cap sitting cross-legged on the other side of the fence, they introduce themselves with the hesitant but completely charming simplicity that is the hallmark of young boys at this age. Knowing that this exploration is against his father's explicit orders, Bruno decides to tell nobody, not even his twelve year old sister, about his new friend. But each day that he can, he returns to the same spot outside the fence so that he and Shmuel can trade stories and confidences and talk as all young boys have done throughout time.

Despite Bruno's painfully slow, hesitant and quite immature growth into awareness of the starvation, beatings and privations that the thousands of people on the other side of the camp are enduring, he still expresses the outlandishly ironic sentiment that he is jealous of Shmuel being inside the camp. Obviously Shmuel has hundreds of boys that he might befriend whereas Bruno, on the outside, is all by himself.

The heart-breaking ending of the story, while it suffers from easy predictability, is no less powerful in its impact and the delivery of its ultimate message - that prejudice is never inherent in the young; that hatred, bigotry and cruelty must be taught and learned; that all mankind's races are, after all, the same and that any perceived differences are as cosmetic, as insubstantial and, ultimately, as meaningless, as being dressed in a pair of striped pajamas and a cap or being marked with a tattoo.

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, never explicit or graphic in its depiction of the violent brutalities of the Holocaust, is a powerful book with an important message suitable for young readers. Although Hitler's Final Solution was not the context in which this phrase was coined, "Lest we forget" somehow seems appropriate. If I had young children, I would want them to learn this lesson from such an extraordinary source.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss