John Boyne, Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Few people understand that discrimination and racism still take place today. John Boyne's novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, presents the thoughts of a German boy, Bruno, who has a Jewish friend, Shmuel, during the Holocaust. Both nine-year-old boys maintained an unyielding relationship with each other during the Holocaust, a horrendous era of discrimination towards the Jews from Germans, despite their differences. Many readers would believe that John Boyne wrote this novel inappropriately, because a majority of characters were not convincing, and the subject of the Holocaust was too serious for a children's book. To begin, many people would believe that the novel was written improperly, because most of the characters were unrealistic. One of the characters, Bruno, knew absolutely nothing about the tragedy that was occurring during the Holocaust. In fact, Bruno's own father was the commandant of one of the largest concentration camps for Jews. At one point, the novel states, "...when they asked Bruno what his father did he opened his mouth to tell them, then realized that he didn't know himself..." (Boyne, 5). It is quite evident that Bruno is not like any other normal child, because he doesn't even know what his father does for a living. Most people know what their parents' occupations are at a very young age. Obviously, Bruno is a very impractical character for not knowing what his father's job was, therefore, making the novel unsuitable for the delicate subject of the Holocaust. In addition, the novel was not rational, because the subject of the Holocaust was too serious a topic for a children's book. The entire novel was written from a youngster's point of view in which many readers found unsettling, because of the atrocious stories told by Holocaust survivors, In a book review written by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, it firmly stated, "...Auschwitz survivors...tell me how the stench of burning human flesh and ashes of corpses from the crematoria filled the