Well,...

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
von John Boyne

Bewertet mit 2 Sternen

“What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?”

Bruno is 9 and lives in Berlin in 1943 with his parents and 12 year old sister. They are wealthy and his father is an important soldier who is promoted to be the Commandant at Auschwitz. The trick of the story is that Bruno doesn't realise the horror of what goes on behind the barbed wire, where everyone wears striped pyjamas, even when he befriends a boy of the same age at a corner of the camp.

There are so many historical inaccuracies and ludicrous details in this totally implausible story of Boyne's. Bruno's ignorance of basics, impossible when he would have been in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi education system. This travesty of the Holocaust is called a 'fable' as if with all its faults, it has special claim on some gravitas, thus giving Boyne justification for this lame expose of racism.

The ending served no purpose. It didn't make the father see what was wrong, it didn't make the guards question what they were doing, it didn't make the Jews who died in the camp any less tragic, what was the ending's purpose? My guess is just shock value. This book was not really about the Holocaust, it really was not about the relationship between a German boy and a Jewish boy during the Holocaust--it was a book that was just built up to that second to last chapter with the only purpose of making readers sad and angry and upset.