Boy in The Striped Pajamas

Pages: 224

Pages Read: 60

Author: John Boyne

Genre: Historical Fiction

So far I have read a good 60 pages of my book. This is a book set in Berlin, during the second world war. The main character is Bruno, a nine year old German boy who despises his sister. The family is rich, because his father is high up in the Nazi military. They live in a huge house, right in the center of the capitol, and everything is going well for Bruno, he has all of his friends living nearby, and loves all of the Cafe's and markets close by. Until he comes back from school to find his maid, who he has known since he was three, packing up his clothes. He demands to know what is happening and she says that he should talk to his mother. He storms down to his mother and she breaks the news to him, the family is leaving the city, and all off Bruno's friends, to a new house, because of his father's military job. When he arrives, he already hates it, simply for the reason that it isn't the old house. Later that day his sister and he see a group of people who seem to look very sad, some crying being whipped around, as if they where slaves, beyond a looming fence of barbed wire. When his father asks him to talk with him about the new house, Bruno becomes stubborn and shouts at his father, something he has never done before and instantly regrets. 

His father silently, but purposefully utters the words "go to yo'r room, and Bruno knows it's final. Although he does manage to sneak in one last question. He asks his father who the unhappy people in the camp are and his father simply replies saying that they aren't people, and that he shouldn't worry about them, before reminding his son to say the words, that his son doesn't even understand and thinks that they are simply a greeting, the words are "Heil Hitler". These people in the camps, I realized, must have been the Jews that Nazi's kept and experimented on. The descriptions of sadness that the author gives make it even more real. The note that I finished on was extremely powerfully written and left an impression on me, the Heil Hitler.  So I think that this book is extremely powerful and It's made even better by the way it's written from the point of view of an innocent nine year old boy.