A few years ago a Holocaust novel for children caused a big stir. It was called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne and it was about a very innocent boy, the son of a Nazi, who couldn't quite grasp what was going on in the concentration camp nearby. It's sort of a parable, along the lines of Lois Lowry's The Giver. Adult readers know what's going on long before the protagonist does, and many adults find the book very disturbing, and can't suspend their disbelief long enough to deal with the boy's naivete.
Well, now the book's been made into a movie. I haven't seen it yet, but it should be interesting to see how well the adaptation works and whether it gets a different response from the book. If you have read the book or if you see the film, please post a comment and share your opinion!
Kent Turner -- School Library Journal, 11/5/2008 7:27:00 AM
Photo courtesy of David Lukacs/ Miramax Films
The film adaptation of John Boyle’s controversial novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Random/David Fickling Bks., 2006), begins in the hustle and bustle of early-1940s Berlin. Bruno’s father, a Nazi SS officer, has been promoted to a new job far from home, and his young German son dreads the thought of moving and leaving his friends behind. Offering little comfort, his father tells the eight-year-old that “life isn’t about choices, but duty.” Bruno’s worst fears are confirmed when he arrives at a gloomy new home in the isolated countryside. There are no children nearby, and his older sister has little time for him. However, from his new bedroom window, he detects huts and people in the distance, and assumes they’re farmers oddly dressed in pajamas. Little does he realize that the local residents are really Jews who are imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Photo courtesy of David Lukacs/ Miramax Films
One afternoon, bored with his homework, Bruno sneaks out into the forbidden backwoods. Approaching a barbed-wire fence, he meets a boy on the other side—Shmuel. The young Jewish boy’s head is shaved, and he wears a stripped uniform. Before Bruno has a chance to ask many questions, like why Shmuel’s uniform has a stitched-on number, a whistle summons Shmuel away, but not before the boys agree to meet at the same spot the following day, with Bruno promising to bring food. Asa Butterfield and Jack Scanlon, as Bruno and Shmuel, respectively, give startlingly lucid and unaffected performances.
Like the book’s readers, the audience will be several steps ahead of Bruno. The film’s literal but subtly powerful portrayal of the concentration camp beyond the walls of Bruno’s backyard—including brief shots of tall smokestacks bellowing black clouds—provokes a chilling response. And though director Mark Herman shies away from graphically showing the Holocaust’s horrors, the film doesn’t back away from depicting the camp’s purpose.
Photo courtesy of David Lukacs/ Miramax Films
The novel’s Bruno has his own private vocabulary, substituting “the Fury” for the Fuhrer and “Out-With” for Auschwitz, the notorious death camp. The film’s dialogue, instead, is completely straightforward. Bruno’s father, and especially his mother, are less in the background and more front and center on screen. Boyle hints at the mother’s depression (her frequent naps and “medicinal” glasses of sherry), while actress Vera Farmiga plays her in full meltdown mode, more cognizant of her husband’s job as the head of the camp than the novel’s counterpart.
In this way, the film is also about the price the parents pay for their blind loyalty to the Third Reich and their willful ignorance of the camp. Sophisticated and involving, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas offers a fuller picture of the period and a stunner of a conclusion, departing from most screen adaptations, and which will strongly appeal to adults and mature teens.
In his author’s note, Boyle explains why he told the story through the eyes of a naive boy who can’t grasp the world around him: “After all, only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence.” Intelligent and uncompromisingly faithful to the novel, the film delivers that painful message in no uncertain terms.
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