What is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas about?
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is John Boyne's 2006 novel about a nine-year-old German boy who befriends a Jewish boy through the fence of a concentration camp without ever understanding what the camp is. Bruno's father has been promoted to commandant of a place Bruno hears as "Out-With", and from his bedroom window he can see hundreds of people in what he takes to be striped pyjamas. This The Boy in the Striped Pajamas summary follows the year he spends walking the fence to sit with Shmuel, a boy born on exactly the same day as him, and the final adventure that kills them both. Boyne wrote the first draft in about sixty hours and subtitles the American edition "A Fable"; it has sold more than eleven million copies in over fifty languages. It is also the most heavily criticised Holocaust novel ever written for children, and this page covers that criticism directly.
What genre is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne?
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne is historical fiction, though Boyne insists on the word fable and the American edition prints it as a subtitle — a distinction he leans on whenever the book's accuracy is challenged. It is narrated in the third person, closely tied to Bruno's nine-year-old understanding, and the whole design depends on the reader knowing what the narrator does not. The two mispronunciations carry that weight: Auschwitz becomes "Out-With", which Bruno takes to be the name of the house, and the Führer becomes "the Fury". The publisher's recommended age is twelve and up, and Boyne himself does not recommend it for nine-year-olds despite his protagonist being one. As this summary of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas explains further down, historians and Holocaust educators regard the premise as impossible and the book as actively unhelpful in classrooms — the Auschwitz Memorial has said so publicly. Boyne published a sequel in 2022, All the Broken Places, following Bruno's sister Gretel at ninety-one.
How many chapters are in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas?
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has 20 chapters, and every one of them carries a title written in Bruno's register — long, literal, slightly comic, and increasingly at odds with what is actually happening:
Berlin and the move
- 1. Bruno Makes a Discovery
- 2. The New House
- 3. The Hopeless Case
- 4. What They Saw Through the Window
- 5. Out Of Bounds At All Times And No Exceptions
Life at Out-With
- 6. The Overpaid Maid
- 7. How Mother Took Credit for Something That She Hadn't Done
- 8. Why Grandmother Stormed Out
- 9. Bruno Remembers That He Used to Enjoy Exploration
Shmuel
- 10. The Dot That Became a Speck That Became a Blob That Became a Figure That Became a Boy
- 11. The Fury
- 12. Shmuel Thinks of an Answer to Bruno's Question
- 13. The Bottle of Wine
- 14. Bruno Tells a Perfectly Reasonable Lie
- 15. Something He Shouldn't Have Done
The last months
- 16. The Haircut
- 17. Mother Gets Her Own Way
- 18. Thinking Up the Final Adventure
- 19. What Happened the Next Day
- 20. The Last Chapter
Chapter ten is the one people remember the title of, because it is the book's method in a single line: Bruno cannot name what he is looking at until it is close enough to be a boy.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas summary
This The Boy in the Striped Pajamas summary starts in Berlin, in a five-storey house with a banister perfect for sliding down. Bruno comes home from school to find the maid packing his things. His father has been promoted after a dinner attended by the Fury — a brusque, rude little man who came with a beautiful blonde woman — and the family is moving to where his new job is. Bruno is nine, and what he minds most is leaving Karl, Daniel and Martin, his three best friends for life. His mother says bitterly that they should never have let the Fury come to dinner.
The new house at Out-With is small, cold and isolated: three floors, no other children, no shops, nothing to explore. From his bedroom window Bruno can see huts and smokestacks and hundreds of people — men, boys, old men, no women — all wearing striped pyjamas and striped cloth caps. He asks his father who they are and gets an answer he cannot do anything with: those people, his father says, smiling slightly, well, they're not people at all.
Bored past the point of obedience, Bruno remembers that he used to enjoy exploration and sets off along the fence. He walks for about an hour before he sees a dot in the distance that becomes a speck, then a blob, then a figure, then a boy. Shmuel is smaller than him, grey-skinned, barefoot, with enormous sad eyes and an armband with a star. They work out that they were born on the same day, 15 April 1934, and Bruno says they are like twins. Shmuel says: a little bit.
Shmuel is from Cracow. His father made watches, his mother taught languages, and they lived above the shop until they were moved into a walled-off part of the city where two families shared a room, and then put on a train. His mother was taken away from them; he is here with his father and his brother Josef. Bruno hears all of this and understands none of it. He goes back nearly every day for about a year, sits cross-legged on his side of the wire, smuggles food, and imagines that the huts are full of families having a better time than he is, with cafés and children playing hopscotch. Shmuel gets thinner.
The household darkens around them. Gretel, twelve turning thirteen, throws away her entire doll collection in four bags and replaces it with maps of Europe her father supplies, moving pins on them every day after reading the paper, and flirts relentlessly with Lieutenant Kotler. Pavel, the old man who peels the vegetables and waits at table, turns out to have been a doctor in Poland — he cleans and dresses Bruno's knee after a fall and remarks that glancing up at the sky at night does not make a man an astronomer. Bruno's grandmother, a former singer, is the only person in the book who says out loud what she thinks of the uniform: she tells her son it makes her ashamed, and storms out shouting the word. She dies before they are reconciled.
Two incidents mark the turn. At a formal dinner Pavel spills wine on Kotler's lap, and what Kotler does next is unexpected and extremely unpleasant, and nobody at the table — not Bruno, not Gretel, not his mother, not his father — steps in to stop it. Boyne never describes it, and Pavel never appears in the book again. Later, when Kotler catches Bruno eating food Shmuel has given him, Bruno panics and denies knowing Shmuel at all. Shmuel is punished for it, and turns up days later with a bruised face. Bruno's apology, and Shmuel's immediate forgiveness, is the most straightforwardly moving thing in the novel.
Bruno's mother, drinking more and sleeping through afternoons, eventually persuades his father that the children should go back to Berlin. With days left, Bruno learns that Shmuel's father has gone missing on a work detail. They plan the final adventure: Shmuel will bring a spare set of striped pyjamas, Bruno will come over the other side and help him look. Bruno's head has already been shaved after a lice outbreak, which is what makes the disguise possible at all.
How does The Boy in the Striped Pajamas end?
Bruno leaves his own clothes and boots in a pile beside the fence, puts on the striped pyjamas and cap, and rolls under the wire at the one spot Shmuel has been using unobserved for a year. His pyjamas are instantly caked in mud and he thinks he has never been so filthy and it feels wonderful.
Inside, nothing matches what he had imagined. There are no cafés and no games. There are emaciated people with shaved heads sitting on the ground staring at nothing, which Bruno assumes is another outbreak of lice; there are soldiers shouting at men on their knees, and other soldiers laughing while they sight down their rifles. He says he does not think he likes it here. They search for an hour and a half and find nothing.
Then a whistle blows and ten soldiers close in around their section. Shmuel says it happens sometimes — they make people go on marches. Bruno objects that he has to be home for dinner, because it is roast beef. About a hundred people are pushed together with the two boys in the middle. Bruno, still trying to be helpful, wants to whisper to everyone that it must be all right, because his father is the Commandant and this is the kind of thing his father wants people to do. From the back come loud noises like gunshots that he cannot identify. Shmuel says he never sees the people again after they have gone on a march.
It starts to pour with rain, and Bruno is less marching than being swept along. Steps lead up into a long room that is surprisingly warm and very securely built, because no rain is getting in anywhere — in fact it feels completely airtight. Bruno is relieved, and says they will just have to wait until it eases off and then he can go home. The novel never uses the words gas chamber.
He apologises to Shmuel for not finding his father. Then he finds he cannot remember the names or the faces of his three best friends from Berlin, and decides it does not matter, because they are not his best friends any more anyway. He takes hold of Shmuel's tiny hand and squeezes it, and tells him he is his best friend for life. Shmuel may have opened his mouth to answer, but Bruno never hears it: the door closes with a loud metallic sound and a gasp goes up from everyone in the room, and Bruno assumes it is to keep the rain out. Then the room goes very dark, and despite the chaos that follows he is still holding Shmuel's hand, and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let it go.
Nothing more is ever heard of Bruno. Several days later a soldier finds the pile of clothes and boots by the fence; the Commandant comes, examines the spot, looks left and right exactly as his son used to, and cannot make sense of it. Bruno's mother stays a few months and then goes back to the Berlin house half expecting to find him on the doorstep. Gretel spends a lot of time crying alone in her room, and Boyne is careful to say it is not about the dolls or the maps — she just misses her brother.
His father stays another year, ruling his men mercilessly and becoming hated by them, and then one day he works it out. He goes back to the fence, finds the gap where the base is not properly attached, follows it through logically step by step, and his legs stop working; he ends up sitting on the ground in almost exactly the spot where Bruno sat every afternoon for a year. A few months after that, soldiers come for him, and he goes with them without complaint and is happy to do so, because he no longer minds what they do to him.
The last two lines are the most argued-over in the book, and they are ironic rather than reassuring: that is the end of the story about Bruno and his family, all of this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again — not in this day and age.
Who are the main characters in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas?
Bruno: Nine years old, the commandant's son, and the narrator's entire field of vision. Curious, self-absorbed, desperate to be an explorer, and sustained in an innocence that is both the book's engine and the thing critics attack hardest. He dies in the gas chamber holding his friend's hand.
Shmuel: A Jewish boy from Cracow, born the same day as Bruno, imprisoned with his father and his brother Josef after their mother is taken from them. Grey-skinned and starving, with enormous sad eyes. He is given almost no inner life of his own, which is one of the more serious charges against the novel.
Gretel: Bruno's sister, twelve turning thirteen, whom he calls the Hopeless Case. Her indoctrination is the clearest thing in the book: she bins her dolls, hangs her father's maps of Europe, moves pins on them daily from the newspapers, and waits at the window for Lieutenant Kotler. Boyne made her the protagonist of the 2022 sequel.
Father, Ralf: The camp commandant, promoted after the Fury came to dinner. Warm with his son, capable of private decency, and the man who says the prisoners are not people at all. He works out what happened a year too late, and when soldiers come for him he does not resist.
Mother: Never named in the novel — the name Elsa comes from the 2008 film and has leaked into a great many summaries since. She resents her husband's promotion, drinks through the afternoons, and is the one who finally forces the decision to send the children back to Berlin.
Lieutenant Kotler: A young blond officer who calls Bruno little man and ruffles his hair. He assaults Pavel over a spilled glass of wine in a scene the novel refuses to describe. When it emerges that his own father, a literature professor, left Germany in 1938, Bruno's father's manner toward him changes and he is transferred away.
Pavel: An elderly Jewish prisoner who peels the vegetables and waits at table, and who was a doctor in Poland before the war. He dresses Bruno's injured knee with great gentleness. After Kotler's violence he simply stops appearing; his death is left to inference.
Maria: The family's maid, loyal to Ralf because he paid for her dying mother's care out of his own pocket. She keeps her head down and visibly stops herself from telling Bruno what she actually thinks.
Grandmother, Nathalie: A former singer and the only openly dissenting voice in the family, who confronts her son about his uniform and what it stands for, tells him it makes her ashamed, and leaves shouting the word. She dies unreconciled, and he attends the funeral in his most decorated uniform.
Best quotes from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
The lines most often quoted from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, verified against the text:
"Ah, those people," said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. "Those people ... well, they're not people at all, Bruno."
"Young man," said Pavel, "I certainly am a doctor. Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know."
"The thing about exploring is that you have to know whether the thing you've found is worth finding. Some things are just sitting there, minding their own business, waiting to be discovered. Like America. And other things are probably better off left alone. Like a dead mouse at the back of a cupboard."
"You're my best friend, Shmuel," he said. "My best friend for life."
"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."
Two warnings. The often-quoted line about not being supposed to be friends because they are meant to be enemies is film dialogue, not from the book. And the epigraph about childhood being measured out by sounds and smells is John Betjeman, from Summoned by Bells, not Boyne's own prose.
Frequently asked questions
Is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas a true story?
No. It is fiction, subtitled "A Fable" in the American edition, and both boys are invented. This is the single most persistent misconception about the book, and Boyne says he tells school audiences directly that the story is made up. He wrote the first draft in roughly sixty hours from a single image he had in his head — two boys the mirror of each other, sitting on either side of a wire fence — and revised it through ten drafts before submitting it.
Is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas historically accurate?
No, and this is the central controversy around it. In January 2020 the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial stated publicly that the book "should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust", and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust's official guidelines recommend against using it in teaching. The historian David Cesarani called the story "utterly implausible", noting that except in rare cases there were no Jewish children in the extermination camps because they were murdered on arrival, and that camp fences were heavily guarded and frequently electrified. A boy in Shmuel's position could not have sat unobserved at the perimeter for an hour a day across a year, and the base of the fence could not have been lifted. Bruno's total ignorance is also implausible for the son of an SS commandant, who would by law have been in the Hitler Youth.
Why is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas criticised by educators?
There are four separate arguments and they are worth keeping apart. The first is factual impossibility, above. The second is where the sympathy goes: the reader's emotional investment sits with a Nazi commandant's family, while Shmuel is a one-dimensional victim with almost no personality. The third is measured harm — research by University College London's Centre for Holocaust Education found that although students knew it was fiction, they overwhelmingly described it as realistic, and it fed the misconception that ordinary Germans were ignorant or were victims themselves. In that study 84 per cent of students who had seen any Holocaust-related film had seen this one. Notably, only 9 per cent of teachers who had completed UCL's most intensive training used it, against 54 per cent of teachers with no training at all. The fourth is that it displaces real survivor testimony from classrooms.
How has John Boyne responded to the criticism?
Consistently, and along three lines. He argues that a fable is not a textbook: asked about the electrified fence, he said that is exactly why it is a fable, and that fiction is after emotional truth rather than facts alone. He points out that he never wrote it for classrooms — "I did not write a text book", and if you want the facts of the Holocaust you should read non-fiction. And he argues the net effect has been positive, since a generation of children got some first insight into the Holocaust from it and some went on to read further. He has also acknowledged, in a 2021 essay, that being many young readers' first encounter with the subject gives the book a responsibility of its own.
What happens to Bruno's father at the end?
He stays at Out-With for another year after Bruno disappears, becomes hated by the men he commands, and then finally reasons out what must have happened: he finds the gap under the fence, follows the logic step by step, and collapses on the ground where his son used to sit. A few months later soldiers arrive and he is ordered to go with them, and he goes willingly because he no longer cares what they do to him. The novel does not identify the soldiers and never mentions liberation — plot summaries that say Allied troops arrive are adding something the text does not contain.
What age is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas suitable for?
The publisher's recommendation is twelve and up, which Common Sense Media echoes. The reading level is far lower — around a fifth-grade reading age — so the constraint is emotional and thematic rather than linguistic. Boyne himself does not recommend it for nine-year-olds. Given the educational criticism, teachers who use it are generally advised to pair it with factual material and survivor testimony rather than let it stand alone, and to make sure students already have enough historical grounding to spot what the book gets wrong. For the same age group, The Book Thief and Number the Stars are the novels most often recommended in its place.
Related summaries
Number the Stars
Lois Lowry
Number the Stars, published in 1989, is a historical novel by Lois Lowry set in Copenhagen in September 1943, when the Germans began rounding up Denmark's Jews and the Danish Resis...
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys, written by Colson Whitehead, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the horrors of a brutal Jim Crow-era reform school and the two boys whose friendship is tested...
Daisy Jones and the Six
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Daisy Jones and the Six, written by Taylor Jenkins Reid, is a bestselling novel about the meteoric rise and sudden breakup of a fictional 1970s rock band. This Daisy Jones and the ...