The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas - 2008

This is an emotional tale of war through a young, naive eight year old German boy's point of view. It really touched me when I saw it at a New York City movie theater in 2008. The drama is also seen through the eyes of another eight-year-old Jewish inmate in a concentration camp.


The story is adapted from a 2006 novel written by Irish novelist John Boyne. Unlike the months of planning Boyne devoted to his other books, he said that he wrote the entire first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in two and a half days, barely sleeping until he got to the end. To date, the novel has sold more than 5 million copies around the world, and was published as "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" in the United States. In both 2007 and 2008 it was the best selling book of the year in Spain. The book has also reached number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, as well as in the UK, Ireland, Australia and many other countries.


Some critics have called the very premise of the book and subsequent film—that there would be a child of Shmuel's age in the camp— an unacceptable fabrication. Reviewing the original book, Rabbi Benjamin Blech wrote: "Note to the reader: There were no eight-year-old Jewish boys in Auschwitz - the Nazis immediately gassed those not old enough to work."


According to statistics from the Labour Assignment Office, Auschwitz-Birkenau contained 619 living male children from one month to fourteen years old on August 30, 1944. On January 14, 1945, 773 male children were registered as living at the camp. "The oldest children were fifteen, and fifty-two were less than eight years of age." "Some children were employed as camp messengers and were treated as a kind of curiosity, while every day an enormous number of children of all ages were killed in the gas chambers.