Plot (attention: spoiler!)
Bruno is just 9 year old when he has to abandon his wonderful and big house in Berlin to move to a smaller, ugly house in the middle of nothing called Out-With. There aren’t shops in Out-With, no bars, no groceries, no people and, above all, no friends. The only children living at Out-With are those ones that Bruno can see from his window, all gathered inside a huge, sad camp full of huts and strange buildings.
Bruno’s father is a Commandant. He has been asked directly from the Fury to join that place because the Fury “has big projects in his mind for him”. Mother is proud, his elder sister is proud and also Bruno is proud, though he doesn’t like Out-With at all.
Bruno loves exploring. He wants to be an explorer, when he’ll be grown up. His old house in Berlin offered him a lot of places and holes and niches to sift and he spent his days pretending to be an explorer. But in Out-With there isn’t anything to be discovered, anything interesting at all. Except for the boundless fence that separates him from thousands of people wearing all the same clothes: a white and black striped pyjamas. Those people don’t seem to be happy, they don’t even seem to be in good health. Sometimes a soldier approaches them and shouts and after the shouts some persons fall down and never stand up again. Other times he can see the children gathered together in a big group, surrounded by the soldiers, crying.
Bruno doesn’t understand why those people and children are so unhappy and scared. Probably he’s wrong, maybe those people are just neighbours living in that strange camp called Out-With too, as his own home.
One afternoon Bruno decides to reprise his exploring game. He goes out and starts walking, following the fence. After one hour of walk he saws a figure, a child, sat cross-legs on the ground, staring at the dust beneath him.
This meeting signs the birth of a special friendship. The boy, who’s name is Shmuel, is of the same age as Bruno and, moreover, they were born on the very same day.
Bruno and Shmuel spend a lot of afternoons together. They sit on the two sides of the fence and talk until it comes for Bruno the time to go back home. Shmuel is always pale, always grey and sick, and eats eagerly the food that Bruno brings with him from home. Neither Bruno or Shmuel can understand what’s going on at Out-With. Shmuel tells Bruno of his grandfather’s sudden disappearance and, then, also his father’s, but no one of the two can guess what has happened or where they did go.
One year passes and Bruno knows few things more about the strange place on the other side of the fence. He meets with Shmuel each afternoon, glad to have found a good friend also there. Sometimes Shmuel arrives with injuries or hematomas or bruises, but never answers to Bruno’s questions about them.
One day Bruno’s unhappy mother decides to leave Out-With – which correct name Bruno’s sister has tried to teach him over and over again, without any success – and to come back to Berlin with her two children. Being the Commandant of Out-With – the place where those people, that Bruno now knows are called Jews, live – he can’t reach them in Berlin, he has to stay there.
Bruno and Shmuel have to say goodbye. They want to greet in a special way, so they agree to go exploring together the last day before Bruno’s leaving: he’ll wear a striped pyjamas, too, and will reach Shmuel on the other side of the fence. So they do: the day of their last meeting Shmuel collects a pyjamas for his friend and gives it to Bruno.
Bruno doesn’t feel comfortable inside the camp. People seem even unhappier than before and everywhere he looks he just sees dirt, sadness and mud. He desires to go home, but he has a promise to keep: he has to help Shmuel to find his father.
Walking inside that strange and awful place, side by side, the two boys feel in some way happy. They’re together for the really last time and they’re doing an exploring, as Bruno has always hoped.
The arrival of a group of soldiers will interrupt their game. Bruno, Shmuel and a hundreds of other people will be gathered and obliged to start a march. The rain has started to pour down again, Bruno wants to come back home but instead he finds himself inside a strange room, still side by side with Shmuel, still in the middle of the big crowd of Jews. Suddenly, when the lights turn off and people around start crying, he focus that Shmuel is now his best friend for life and that he’s happy to be with him, no matter what’s going to happen. He takes Shmuel’s hand and then nothing more is heard by him.
There ends Bruno’s story. They search for him for over a year, asking themselves where he did go. His clothes, abandoned by the fence the day he changed them with the striped pyjamas, are found some days after his disappearance, but nobody can understand why they are there or what has happened to him.
Only his father one day, sitting in the very same point where Bruno used to sit and looking at the uprooted fence, focuses what has really happened to his son more than one year before. And, in the same time, suddenly understands that his own job has rebelled against him: his son has been a victim of the plan he had been managing for years. He’s been killed.
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How could a reader express how one feels after finishing such a terrible book? Its subtitle, “A story of innocence in a world of ignorance” couldn’t fit better. The reader sees the events through the innocent eyes of Bruno, who doesn’t understand what’s happening just few steps far from his house, but the reader knows what’s really happening and what Bruno’s seeing. And, moreover, the reader knows that Out-With is Auschwitz and that the Fury is, really, the Fuhrer, names that Bruno is unable to pronounce correctly. That’s why the story is so piercing: each time the reader understands what Bruno has really seen, he felt shocked, he felt sad, he felt… ashamed. Because the friendship between Bruno, a son of the Great Germany, and Shmuel, just “a Jew”, brutally teach how people are all the same and how the innocence of children can go beyond adults blindness, wickedness and ignorance. They belong to different cultures and people, they were born in the very same day… and they die in the very same day, side by side, hand in hand.
A really brilliant idea for a plot that doesn’t miss to touch and to teach. Even if it’s a well-known story, even if it seems there’s nothing more or new that a book can ever teach about this subject. It shows to readers how they can be wrong.
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