The boy in the striped pyjamas

Aryan or Jew?

Abstract

The novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: a Fable, by Irish writer John Boyne, was published in 2006 and in 2008 it gave rise to a movie; it deals with the friendship between two boys, Bruno and Shmuel - who were born on the same day -, confined in an extermination camp, one on each side of the wire fence that delimits the camp.
Book and movie were hugely successful, to the point that the book, translated into dozens of languages and with millions of copies sold, was compared with Anne Frank's Diary and began to be used as a pedagogical resource for teaching the Shoah to children of school age. In this article, starting from a recapitulation of the historical framework in which the novel's action is set - the catastrophe that befell the Jewish people under the National Socialist barbarism -, we reflect on the adequacy of its didactic use, mainly from the point of view of verisimilitude and respect for the historical facts referred to in it.