Intro.

The //Boy In The Striped Pajamas// is about a nine year old child, Bruno, and his friendship with a Jewish boy named Shmuel. Bruno happens to be the son of the Nazi Commandant that is in charge of the concentration camp Auschwitz, and Shmuel is a nine year old prisoner in the camp. Throughout the book, Bruno sneaks off to meet with Shmuel by deceiving his parents and talking to Shmuel through the fence with no guards around. While reading //The Boy In The Striped Pajamas//, it appeared to be very easy for Shmuel to escape from the camp if he chose to. Also, when Bruno left for hours on end everyday for a year straight the guardians that were in his house at the time had no idea that he was gone. He said he was going to play on the swing and if someone looked out the window they would have realized that he was not there. This book takes place at the largest death camp, Auschwitz, and Bruno and Shmuel somehow manage to talk every day for a year. This would never happen at an actual death camp because Shmuel would have died within days of him being there. This book should not be taught in schools because of how it alters the Holocaust in an unrealistic way.

The plot of the book is based around the friendship between a Jewish boy, Shmuel, in a concentration camp, and Bruno, the son of a Nazi Commandant. Bruno's father has been put in charge of Auschwitz, the largest death camp during World War II. A flaw in the book is that these two became friends because if this actually took place during the Holocaust, Bruno and Shmuel would have never met. They would have never met because Auschwitz was a death camp, so the boy would have been dead within days of being at the camp. (scrapbookpages.com).The book states that Bruno visited Shmuel almost everyday for a year. Another reason these two children would have never met is because Bruno would not have lived that close to the concentration camp. The real Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, lived on a main road, much further away than Bruno's family. He also had five children that did not escape to the camp like Bruno did, and it was even safe enough where his family was able to live there after he was relieved of his duties there. (scrapbook pages.com).

//The Boy in the Striped Pajamas// underplayed the security of the concentration camp. "Auschwitz was surrounded by high electric barbed wire fences, which were guarded by SS soldiers armed with machine guns and rifles." (http://isurvived.org/AUSCHWITZ_TheCamp.html). In the book, every day Bruno and Shmuel would have conversations with each other in the corner of the concentration camp. While they talked for hours at times, nobody around them had noticed what was going on at the time. The guards who were supposed to be guarding the fence from the tower were no where to be found in the book, and the prisoners that Shmuel was working with did not even notice that he was gone. The fences all around the camp had an electric charge going through them so that no prisoner could attempt an escape. Bruno actually lifts up this fence in the book without being electrocuted, and this would have been an easy escape for Shmuel. At the end of the book Bruno decides that he is going to sneak into the concentration camp to help Shmuel find his father. The next day, Shmuel brings him a pair of "striped pajamas," and Bruno puts them on and proceeds to lift the fence up. This underplays the security of the camp because two nine year old boys just beat the security system. Instead of breaking people out of the camp, Bruno snuck in; which leads to his death.

Bruno took these long adventures that would last at least an hour to a few hours in the middle of the day. His guardians were unaware that he was doing this, and they were ignorant to the entire situation. When he took these adventures to see his friend Shmuel, he simply told his parents and his maid that he was going to play on his rope swing in the front yard. This is far fetched because Bruno had already badly injured himself on this swing and his mother still allows him to play on it with no supervision. She does not even have Maria (the maid) watch him from a window while she does chores. That is poor parental supervision and it shows the ignorance of his mother to not have somebody watching her only son that is only nine years of age. This leads to; why did they not notice him gone from the fenced in front yard? Bruno's mother was home most of the day when Bruno would sneak out, but she did not notice him missing from the tire swing even though she just had to look out of the front window to notice him gone. That is why Bruno's guardians are ignorant in the book, a child of the Commandant has people looking after him when he is home, and they did not notice him gone.

Overall, //The Boy In The Striped Pajamas// should not be taught in any school because it distorts what really happened during the Holocaust in an unrealistic way. Bruno would have never met Shmuel at the concentration camp because they would not have lived that close to the camp, and the guards would have seen Bruno walking along the fence. Bruno’s guardians would have noticed that he was missing for hours, even though he said he was just going outside to play on his swing. The camp security would have noticed Shmuel being gone from his duty of building the hut with other prisoners. These events would have never occurred at Auschwitz. This book strays from the truth and should not be taught in high school.