The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

by John Boyne

  'Thanks,' said Bruno, scratching his stubbly head and wondering why he hadn't remembered to bring a bag to hold his own clothes in. The ground was so dirty here that they would be spoiled if he left them on the ground. He didn't have a choice really. He could either leave them here until later and accept the fact that they would be entirely caked with mud; or he could call the whole thing off and that, as any explorer of note knows, would have been out of the question.

  'Well, turn round,V said Bruno, pointing at his friend as he stood there awkwardly. 'I don't want you watching me.'

  Shmuel turned round and Bruno took off his overcoat and placed it as gently as possible on the ground. Then he took off his shirt and shivered for a moment in the cold air before putting on the pyjama top. As it slipped over his head he made the mistake of breathing through his nose; it did not smell very nice.

  'When was this last washed?' he called out, and Shmuel turned round.

  I don't know if it's ever been washed,' said Shmuel.

  'Turn round!' shouted Bruno, and Shmuel did as he was told. Bruno looked left and right again but there was still no one to be seen, so he began the difficult task of taking off his trousers while keeping one leg and one boot on the ground at the same time. It felt very strange taking off his trousers in the open air and he couldn't imagine what anyone would think if they saw him doing it, but finally, and with a great deal of effort, he managed to complete the task.

  'There,' he said. 'You can turn back now.'

  Shmuel turned just as Bruno applied the finishing touch to his costume, placing the striped cloth cap on his head. Shmuel blinked and shook his head. It was quite extraordinary. If it wasn't for the fact that Bruno was nowhere near as skinny as the boys on his side of the fence, and not quite so pale either, it would have been difficult to tell them apart. It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really.

  'Do you know what this reminds me of?' asked Bruno, and Shmuel shook his head.

  'What?' he asked.

  'It reminds me of Grandmother,' he said. 'You remember I told you about her? The one who died?'

  Shmuel nodded; he remembered because Bruno had talked about her a lot over the course of the year and had told him how fond he had been of Grandmother and how he wished he'd taken the time to write more letters to her before she passed away.

  'It reminds me of the plays she used to put on with Gretel and me,' Bruno said, looking away from Shmuel as he remembered those days back in Berlin, part of the very few memories now that refused to fade. 'It reminds me of how she always had the right costume for me to wear. You wear the right outfit and you feel like the person you're pretending to be, she always told me. I suppose that's what I'm doing, isn't it? Pretending to be a person from the other side of the fence.'

  'A Jew, you mean,' said Shmuel.

  'Yes,' said Bruno, shifting on his feet a little uncomfortably. 'That's right.'

  Shmuel pointed at Bruno's feet and the heavy boots he had taken from the house. 'You'll have to leave them behind too,' he said.

  Bruno looked appalled. 'But the mud,' he said. 'You can't expect me to go barefoot.'

  'You'll be recognized otherwise,' said Shmuel. 'You don't have any choice.'

  Bruno sighed but he knew that his friend was right, and he took off the boots and his socks and left them beside the pile of clothes on the ground. At first it felt horrible putting his bare feet into so much mud; they sank down to his ankles and every time he lifted a foot it felt worse. But then he started to rather enjoy it.

  Shmuel reached down and lifted the base of the fence, but it only lifted to a certain height and Bruno had no choice but to roll under it, getting his striped pyjamas completely covered in mud as he did so. He laughed when he looked down at himself. He had never been so filthy in all his life and it felt wonderful.

  Shmuel smiled too and the two boys stood awkwardly together for a moment, unaccustomed to being on the same side of the fence.

  Bruno had an urge to give Shmuel a hug, just to let him know how much he liked him and how much he'd enjoyed talking to him over the last year.

  Shmuel had an urge to give Bruno a hug too, just to thank him for all his many kindnesses, and his gifts of food, and the fact that he was going to help him find Papa.

  Neither of them did hug each other though, and instead they began the walk away from the fence and towards the camp, a walk that Shmuel had done almost every day for a year now, when he had escaped the eyes of the soldiers and managed to get to that one part of Out-With that didn't seem to be guarded all the time, a place where he had been lucky enough to meet a friend like Bruno.

  It didn't take long to get where they were going. Bruno opened his eyes in wonder at the things he saw. In his imagination he had thought that all the huts were full of happy families, some of whom sat outside on rocking chairs in the evening and told stories about how things were so much better when they were children and they'd had respect for their elders, not like the children nowadays. He thought that all the boys and girls who lived here would be in different groups, playing tennis or football, skipping and drawing out squares for hopscotch on the ground.

  He had thought that there would be a shop in the centre, and maybe a small cafe like the ones he had known in Berlin; he had wondered whether there would be a fruit and vegetable stall.

  As it turned out, all the things that he thought might be there-weren't.

  There were no grown-ups sitting on rocking chairs on their porches.

  And the children weren't playing games in groups.

  And not only was there not a fruit and vegetable stall, but there wasn't a cafe either like there had been back in Berlin.

  Instead there were crowds of people sitting together in groups, staring at the ground, looking horribly sad; they all had one thing in common: they were all terribly skinny and their eyes were sunken and they all had shaved heads, which Bruno thought must have meant there had been an outbreak of lice here too.

  In one corner Bruno could see three soldiers who seemed to be in charge of a group of about twenty men. They were shouting at them, and some of the men had fallen to their knees and were remaining there with their heads in their hands.

  In another corner he could see more soldiers standing around and laughing and looking down the barrels of their guns, aiming them in random directions, but not firing them.

  In fact everywhere he looked, all he could see was two different types of people: either happy, laughing, shouting soldiers in their uniforms or unhappy, crying people in their striped pyjamas, most of whom seemed to be staring into space as if they were actually asleep.

  'I don't think I like it here,' said Bruno after a while.

  'Neither do I,' said Shmuel.

  'I think I ought to go home,' said Bruno.

  Shmuel stopped walking and stared at him. 'But Papa,' he said. 'You said you'd help me find him.'

  Bruno thought about it. He had promised his friend that and he wasn't the sort to go back on a promise, especially when it was the last time they were going to see each other. 'AH right,' he said, although he felt a lot less confident now than he had before. 'But where should we look?'

  'You said we'd need to find evidence,' said

  Shmuel, who was feeling upset because he thought that if Bruno didn't help him, then who would?

  'Evidence, yes,' said Bruno, nodding his head. 'You're right. Let's start looking.'

  So Bruno kept his word and the two boys spent an hour and a half searching the camp looking for evidence. They weren't sure exactly what they were looking for, but Bruno kept stating that a good explorer would know it when he found it.

  But they didn't find anything at all that might give them a clue to Shmuel's papa's disappearance, and it started to get darker.

  Bruno looked up at the sky and it looked like it might rain again. 'I'm sorry, Shmuel,' he said eventually. 'I'm sorry we didn't find any evidence.'

  Shmuel nodded his head sadly. He wasn't really sur
prised. He hadn't really expected to. But it had been nice having his friend over to see where he lived all the same.

  'I think I ought to go home now,' said Bruno. 'Will you walk back to the fence with me?'

  Shmuel opened his mouth to answer, but right at that moment there was a loud whistle and ten soldiers-more than Bruno had ever seen gathered together in one place before-surrounded an area of the camp, the area in which Bruno and Shmuel were standing.

  'What's happening?' whispered Bruno. 'What's going on?'

  'It happens sometimes,' said Shmuel. 'They make people go on marches.'

  'Marches!' said Bruno, appalled. 'I can't go on a march. I have to be home in time for dinner. It's roast beef tonight.'

  'Ssh,' said Shmuel, putting a finger to his lips. 'Don't say anything or they get angry.'

  Bruno frowned but was relieved that all the people in striped pyjamas from this part of the camp were gathering together now, most of them being pushed together by the soldiers, so that he and Shmuel were hidden in the centre of them and couldn't be seen. He didn't know what everyone looked so frightened about-after all, marching wasn't such a terrible thing-and he wanted to whisper to them that everything was all right, that Father was the Commandant, and if this was the kind of thing that he wanted the people to do then it must be all right.

  The whistles blew again, and this time the group of people, which must have numbered about a hundred, started to march slowly together, with Bruno and Shmuel still held together in the centre. There was some sort of disturbance towards the back, where some people seemed unwilling to march, but Bruno was too small to see what happened and all he heard was loud noises, like the sound of gunshots, but he couldn't make out what they were. 'Does the marching go on for long?' he whispered because he was beginning to feel quite hungry now.

  'I don't think so,' said Shmuel. 'I never see the people after they've gone on a march. But I wouldn't imagine it does.'

  Bruno frowned. He looked up at the sky, and as he did so there was another loud sound, this time the sound of thunder overhead, and just as quickly the sky seemed to grow even darker, almost black, and rain poured down even more heavily than it had in the morning. Bruno closed his eyes for a moment and felt it wash over him. When he opened them again he wasn't so much marching as being swept along by the group of people, and all he could feel was the mud that was caked all over his body and his pyjamas clinging to his skin with all the rain and he longed to be back in his house, watching all this from a distance and not wrapped up in the centre of it.

  That's it,' he said to Shmuel. 'I'm going to catch a cold out here. I have to go home.'

  But just as he said this, his feet brought him up a set of steps, and as he marched on he found there was no more rain coming down any more because they were all piling into a long room that was surprisingly warm and must have been very securely built because no rain was getting in anywhere. In fact it felt completely airtight.

  'Well, that's something,' he said, glad to be out of the storm for a few minutes at least. 'I expect we'll have to wait here till it eases off and then I'll get to go home.'

  Shmuel gathered himself very close to Bruno and looked up at him in fright.

  'I'm sorry we didn't find your papa,' said Bruno. 'It's all right,' said Shmuel.

  'And I'm sorry we didn't really get to play, but when you come to Berlin, that's what we'll do. And I'll introduce you to… Oh, what were their names again?' he asked himself, frustrated because they were supposed to be his three best friends for life but they had all vanished from his memory now. He couldn't remember any of their names and he couldn't picture any of their faces.

  'Actually,' he said, looking down at Shmuel, 'it doesn't matter whether I do or don't. They're not my best friends any more anyway.' 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.

  'You're my best friend, Shmuel,' he said. 'My best friend for life.'

  Shmuel may well have opened his mouth to say something back, but Bruno never heard it because at that moment there was a loud gasp from all the marchers who had filled the room, as the door at the front was suddenly closed and a loud metallic sound rang through from the outside.

  Bruno raised an eyebrow, unable to understand the sense of all this, but he assumed that it had something to do with keeping the rain out and stopping people from catching colds.

  And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let it go.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Last Chapter

  Nothing more was ever heard of Bruno after that.

  Several days later, after the soldiers had searched every part of the house and gone into all the local towns and villages with pictures of the little boy, one of them discovered the pile of clothes and the pair of boots that Bruno had left near the fence. He left them there, undisturbed, and went to fetch the Commandant, who examined the area and looked to his left and looked to his right just as Bruno had done, but for the life of him he could not understand what had happened to his son. It was as if he had just vanished off the face of the earth and left his clothes behind him.

  Mother did not return to Berlin quite as quickly as she had hoped. She stayed at Out-With for several months waiting for news of Bruno until one day, quite suddenly, she thought he might have made his way home alone, so she immediately returned to their old house, half expecting to see him sitting on the doorstep waiting for her. He wasn't there, of course.

  Gretel returned to Berlin with Mother and spent a lot of time alone in her room crying, not because she had thrown her dolls away and not because she had left all her maps behind at Out-With, but because she missed Bruno so much.

  Father stayed at Out-With for another year after that and became very disliked by the other soldiers, whom he ordered around mercilessly. He went to sleep every night thinking about Bruno and he woke up every morning thinking about him too. One day he formed a theory about what might have occurred and he went back to the place in the fence where the pile of clothes had been found a year before.

  There was nothing particularly special about this place, or different, but then he did a little exploration of his own and discovered that the base of the fence here was not properly attached to the ground as it was everywhere else and that, when lifted, it left a gap large enough for a very small person (such as a little boy) to crawl underneath. He looked into the distance then and followed it through logically, step by step by step, and when he did he found that his legs seemed to stop working right-as if they couldn't hold his body up any longer-and he ended up sitting on the ground in almost exactly the same position as Bruno had every afternoon for a year, although he didn't cross his legs beneath him.

  A few months after that some other soldiers came to Out-With and Father was ordered to go with them, and he went without complaint and he was happy to do so because he didn't really mind what they did to him any more.

  And that's the end of the story about Bruno and his family. Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again.

  Not in this day and age.

  John Boyne

  ***

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