The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, released in 2008, is the film adaptation of John Boyne’s 2006 novel of the same title. The film follows Bruno, the eight-year-old son of a German concentration camp commandant, who befriends a Jewish boy named Shmuel through the camp’s barbed wire fence and who, in the film’s closing sequence, climbs through the fence in his own striped pyjamas to enter the camp and is killed in a gas chamber alongside his friend. The film is widely shown in British schools and is one of the most-watched Holocaust treatments in the British secondary school curriculum.

The book and the film

John Boyne’s novel was published in Ireland and the United Kingdom in 2006 and became a substantial commercial success, with sales of over five million copies in around fifty languages by 2026. Boyne had described the book as a fable rather than a historical novel; he had said in interviews that the book was set in “a place outside ordinary history” and that it was a meditation on the moral consequences of what adults do for children rather than a documentary treatment of the camp. The film adaptation, with screenplay by Mark Herman, follows the novel closely. The two boys are played by Asa Butterfield (Bruno) and Jack Scanlon (Shmuel).

The historical and educational criticism

The book and the film have been the subject of sustained criticism from Holocaust historians and educators. The criticism is unusual in the Holocaust film literature for being not merely about tone or representation but about specific factual claims that the work makes implicitly and that the historians regard as untenable.

The first criticism is that no eight-year-old Jewish boy would have been alive in any concentration camp. The selection process at Auschwitz, where the camp in the film is plainly modelled, sent virtually all children under fourteen to the gas chambers on arrival. A Jewish child of Shmuel’s age who had survived selection would have been an extraordinary exception, would have been kept alive by some specific protector for some specific reason, and would not have had the freedom to sit by an unguarded perimeter fence holding conversations with German children from outside. The work’s central friendship is impossible.

The second criticism is that the camp commandant’s family would not have been ignorant of the camp’s purpose. Commandants’ families lived inside the camp perimeters, smelled the smoke from the crematoria, knew their husbands’ work in the way the wives of any senior official know their husbands’ work. The portrayal of Bruno’s mother as gradually realising what her husband does, and of Bruno as not knowing at all, requires a degree of family ignorance that no surviving documentation supports. The Höss family at Auschwitz, the Stangl family at Treblinka, the Stangl family at Sobibor: in each case the families knew.

The third criticism is that the camp perimeter as portrayed (a single barbed-wire fence with no patrols, no watchtower coverage, no double fencing, no minefield) is unlike any actual concentration camp. The fences at Auschwitz-Birkenau were electrified, double, and patrolled at intervals of less than a hundred metres. The notion that a child could approach the fence from inside, sit by it for hours, and have repeated unobserved conversations with a child from outside is not an artistic compression but a structural impossibility.

The fourth criticism is the argument from effect rather than from accuracy. The Holocaust education researcher Michael Gray, who studied the book’s classroom use in British secondary schools, found that pupils who had read the book held a substantially less accurate picture of the Holocaust than pupils who had not. They were more likely to believe that German children of Bruno’s class did not know about the camps; they were more likely to underestimate the speed and totality of the killing of children; they were more likely to believe that camp conditions allowed for the kind of perimeter conversations the book depicts. Gray’s argument was that the book was actively misinforming the children who read it, and that its widespread use in the British curriculum had produced a generation of teenagers whose Holocaust knowledge was structured by a fictional plot whose premises were historically false.

The defence and the continuing argument

Boyne’s defence has been that the book is a fable rather than a documentary, that the camp is a place of the imagination rather than Auschwitz specifically, and that the book’s subject is the moral catastrophe of the perpetrator family rather than the historical particulars of the camp. The defence has been variously accepted; the principal counter is that the work cannot be a fable about a specific historical institution and at the same time disclaim responsibility for the institution’s actual operation, and that for any ten-year-old reader the camp will be Auschwitz whatever the author intended.

The Auschwitz Memorial took the unusual step in 2020 of issuing a public statement criticising the book and discouraging its use in Holocaust education. The statement reflected the view of the museum’s professional historians and educators that the book’s continued classroom use was actively damaging to the standard of Holocaust education that the museum’s own materials were attempting to establish. The British Department for Education has not removed the book from approved curriculum lists. The argument continues.

The film, in its 2008 release and in its continuing classroom use, is now the most-viewed Holocaust film among British secondary-school pupils. The pedagogic question of what to do about a work that is widely loved by its young readers, that introduces them to the subject, and whose factual basis the historical profession does not accept, is one of the most discussed in contemporary British Holocaust education and is not settled.

See also

Sources

  • John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, David Fickling Books, 2006
  • Mark Herman (dir), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Miramax/BBC Films, 2008
  • Michael Gray, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Blessing or Curse for Holocaust Education?”, in Holocaust Studies, vol 20 no 3, 2014
  • Michael Gray, Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, public statement on the book, 2020, https://www.auschwitz.org
  • UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, research on Holocaust knowledge and understanding among British secondary-school pupils, https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk
  • Lipstadt, Deborah E., “On the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”, various essays and interviews