The Boy in the Striped Pajamas The Boy In the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne is a historical fiction novel about a young boy named Bruno. The Boy In The Striped Pajamas takes place in 1942 at a Nazi Concentration camp in Auschwitz, Germany. During World War II, eight year old Bruno and his family leave Berlin to travel to a concentration camp where his father has just become commandant. Lonely, he wanders out behind his house one day and finds Shmuel, a young Jewish boy. People can use the power of friendship to cross boundaries of race, religion, and culture because sometimes the power of friendship can be the strongest thing to overcome, hate. Friendship crosses many boundaries such as race. Throughout the book Bruno makes friends with a Jew named Shmuel, Bruno ignores the fact that they are both different and instead makes friends with Shmuel because he had lost all of his friends in Berlin. Bruno and Shmuel instead of talking about how they are different, they talk about their …show more content…
In The Boy In The Striped Pajamas they find things in common and don’t care about their race. Bruno is a good friend to Shmuel because Bruno brings food to him under the fence (Boyne 119). Even though he knows he can get in trouble he is still helpful and shows sympathy towards his new best friend. Bruno’s father is the commandant of the Nazi group and doesn’t like the Jews so if he found out this his son was giving food to the Jews he would be very angry. Bruno’s father said that the Jews weren’t really people at all (Boyne 78). Bruno offers food to the hungry Shmuel while he is cleaning the glasses, Lieutenant Kotler notices what is going on and Bruno denies the fact they are friends (Boyne 147). Shmuel and Bruno have a very risky friendship and if one of them were to get caught their friendship would no longer cease to exist. No matter race, religion, or culture Bruno and Shmuel risk their lives to be
While the adults show their disgust and hatred to the Jews, Bruno doesn't mind them and is nice to Pavel, the Jew that got him the tire, and later becomes friends with Shmuel. Bruno’s father is a soldier and is in charge of the concentration camp. Even with all the Jew hating Germans around him, he still goes out to visit Shmuel and doesn’t let them ruin his friendship. Near the end of the movie Bruno shows his friend how much he cares by entering the camp to help look for Shmuel’s father, who had gone missing. While entering the camp, Bruno learned first hand how bad the camps actually were and wished he hadn’t come. Even with these feelings he still wants to help his friend, which eventually leads to his demise.
The overall storyline of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was the same, but in the movie there was a lot of detail lef tout. The movie is more basic and doesnt have as much detail about the characters feelings/emotions. Overall, Bruno learned that curiousity kills, and his family learned to be responsible and not take things
In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, a young naive boy, Bruno, tells from his perspective how the occurrences in the Holocaust took place. In 1943, the beginning of the story, Bruno’s father, a commandant in Hitler’s army, is promoted and moves to Oswiecim with his family. Oswiecim is home to the hideous Auschwitz Concentration Camp. While Bruno is out playing near a fence at the edge of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, against his father’s orders, he becomes friends with a young Jewis...
Let’s start comparing these characters let’s start with the younger one Bruno from The Boy in Striped Pajamas. Bruno is a little nine year old who is living in Berlin with his family. But then his father gets a new and very important job and has to move to out-with. Bruno does not want to move because he doesn’t want to leave his best friend and his grandparents behind. When he gets to out-with he hates it there he has no friends and now has a smaller house. He notices something out of his window. A fence across the street separating him and people in striped uniform. Time passes and he starts to like his new home. One day he went outside to explore witch was not allowed to do and never to come close to the big fence. But he went walking by the big fence until he saw a little boy. He introduced himself as Shmuel. They talked and became secret best friends. “He looked down and did something quite out of character for him: he took hold of Shmuel's tiny hand in his and squeezed it tightly.”- Pg.213 "You're my best friend, Shmuel," he said. "My best friend for life.”-Pg.213
When Bruno moved to Auschwitz he was completely oblivious to the Holocaust. When he met Shmuel, he became slightly more aware, but couldn’t comprehend what it all meant. It is ironic that his innocence sheltered him from the traumatizing truth of the Holocaust, but it is what killed him in the
The book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne is about a young boy, Bruno, whose father is a soldier in the German army during WWII. Bruno lives with his parents and his older sister, Gretel. They live in a five story house in Berlin. He goes to school and has three best friends that he goes on adventures with. One day he comes home to find their maid packing his things. They move to a three story house in Germany because his dad was promoted and needs to be closer to his work.
Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. New York: Little, Brown, 2009.
This book takes place during World War II in Hungarian Transylvania and in different concentration camps. The story begins at Eliezer’s home which is an apartment in a town called Sighet. Other settings in the book are the different concentration camps where Eliezer and his father are prisoners. In every location, Eliezer learns how to survive and grows more into a man.
Friendship is not something that has adapted overtime. The desire to seek out and surround us with other human beings, our friends, is in our nature. Philosophers such as Aristotle infer that friendship is a kind of virtue, or implies virtue, and is necessary for living. Nobody would ever choose to live without friends even if we had all the other good things. The relationship between two very different young boys, Bruno and Shmuel’s in the film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is an example of the everlasting bond of a perfect friendship based upon the goodness of each other. This film portrays one of humanity’s greatest modern tragedies, through heartache and transgression, reflecting various themes through out the movie. Beyond the minor themes some seem to argue as more important in the film, the theme of friendship and love is widely signified and found to be fundamental in understanding the true meaning behind The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
John Boyne's book "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" invites the readers to embark on an imaginative journey at two levels. At the first level, Boyne himself embarks upon an imaginative journey that explores a possible scenario in relation to Auschwitz. Bruno is a 9 year old boy growing up in a loving, but typically authoritarian German family in the 1930?s. His father is a senior military officer who is appointed Commandant of Auschwitz ? a promotion that requires upheaval from their comfortable home in Berlin to an austere home in the Polish countryside. The story explores Bruno?s difficulty in accepting and adapting to this change - especially the loss of his friends and grandparents.
Bruno, an eight year old boy at the time of the war, is completely oblivious to the atrocities of the war around him - even with a father who is a Nazi commandant. The title of the book is evidence to this - Bruno perceives the concentration camp uniforms as "striped pajamas." Further evidence is the misnomers "the Fury," (the Furher) and "Out-With" (Auschwitz). Bruno and Shmuel, the boy he meets from Auschwitz, share a great deal in common but perhaps what is most striking is the childhood innocence which characterizes both boys. Bruno is unaware that his father is a Nazi commandant and that his home is on ther periphery of Auschwitz. Shmuel, imprisoned in the camp, seems not to understand the severity of his situation. When his father goes missing, Shmuel does not understand that he has gone to the gas chamber.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was The book made it seem like he just walked through the camp, into the uniform barracks, and retrieved a uniform like it was no big deal. Again, if this were the 1940s, the Nazis would not allow this to happen, making the book even more unrealistic than it already was. In my opinion, the most major inadequacy in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is how John Boyne made Bruno so naïve for his age.
Imagine waking up on a normal day, in your normal house, in your normal room. Imagine if you knew that that day, you would be taken away from your normal life, and forced to a life of death, sickness, and violence. Imagine seeing your parents taken away from you. Imagine watching your family walk into their certain death. Imagine being a survivor. Just think of the nightmares that linger in your mind. You are stuck with emotional pain gnawing at your sanity. These scenerios are just some of the horrific things that went on between 1933-1945, the time of the Holocaust. This tragic and terrifying event has been written about many times. However, this is about one particularly fascinating story called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne.
‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ is told through the eyes of an eight year old boy shielded from the reality of World War II.
"What happened then was both unexpected and extremely unpleasant. Lieutenant Kotler grew very angry with Pavel and no one - not Bruno, not Gretel, not Mother and not even Father - stepped in to stop him doing what he did next, even though none of them could watch. Even though it made Bruno cry and Gretel grow pale." This quote is from the the book.(Boyne, 148-149). The perception of women in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is that they are useful so long as they believe the lie. The movie “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” describes the Holocaust from a child’s point of view. Bruno thinks the concentration camp is a playground and a place that has a cafe.