The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

by John Boyne

  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 café 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 café 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 pajamas, 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. ‘All 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 surprised. 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 pajamas 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 pajamas 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 r
ain 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.

  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.

  was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of nine novels for adults, five for young readers and a collection of short stories. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, spent sixty-six weeks at number one in Ireland and won two Irish Book Awards, among many others. It was adapted into a successful film by Miramax and, to date, over seven million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. John’s other novels, notably The Absolutist and A History of Loneliness, have been widely praised and are international bestsellers. His novels are published in over forty-five languages. He is married and lives in Dublin.

  johnboyne.com

  is a visual artist and author working in illustration, painting, collage and sculpture. His critically acclaimed picture books have been released internationally and translated into over thirty languages, and his artwork has been exhibited at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Ulster Museum in Belfast and the Palais Auersperg in Vienna. Oliver has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award, Irish Book Award, Texas Bluebonnet Award and United Kingdom Literary Association Award. He will release his fifteenth book as author and illustrator in late 2016. Oliver grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland; he currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

  oliverjeffers.com

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