John Boyne’s 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has become a modern classic, having been adapted into a major film in 2008 and a ballet in 2016. The story follows eight-year-old German boy Bruno, who is unaware that his father is the kommandant of a concentration camp during the second world war. When Bruno meets and befriends a young Jewish camp inmate called Shmuel, the eponymous “boy in the striped pyjamas”, the two boys develop an unlikely friendship.
The novel has attracted controversy for its portrayal of Jewish victims as one dimensional, passive and “unresisting”, and for suggesting no difference between the two boys. In 2020, the Auschwitz Museum tweeted that the children’s novel “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust”.
In January 2023, Noah Max’s opera, The Child in the Striped Pyjamas opened in London. Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle, Max explained that his adaptation was deeply personal: “The music explores the destruction of humanity’s innocence by the Holocaust through a father’s inability to face the fact that his own evil actions led directly to the murder of his child.”
Max’s maternal great-grandparents, Chaim and Klara Tennenhaus, left Austria in the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power. He believes that Boyne’s novel can be used to introduce the Holocaust to younger audiences, saying: “It’s very hard to convince children to read a book about something as dark and serious as the Holocaust and what I find amazing is that while not all adults get the profound symbolism of the story, kids get it. They pick up on the fact that the children have the same birthday and are the same child.”
The novel and its adaptions have been criticised for their focus on grief of Bruno’s parents rather than on the millions of Jews who were murdered in their millions. However, it does allow readers to consider what philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt controversially called “the banality of evil” – that evil is not metaphysical but more ordinary, something that we are all capable of in the wrong circumstances.
As an expert in Holocaust representation on film and someone involved in Holocaust education, I believe that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas should be continued to be read, adapted, staged and performed. Anything that introduces the Holocaust and its significance to audiences should be welcomed – not least because it helps us to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive so many years later.
