John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Fury and Eva stayed for the best part of two hours and neither Gretel nor Bruno were invited downstairs to say goodbye to them. Bruno watched them leave from his bedroom window and noticed that when they stepped towards their car, which he was impressed to see had a chauffeur, the Fury did not open the door for his companion but instead climbed in and started reading a newspaper, while she said goodbye once again to Mother and thanked her for the lovely dinner.

What a horrible man, thought Bruno.

Later that night Bruno overheard snippets of Mother and Father’s conversation. Certain phrases drifted through the keyhole or under the door of Father’s office and up the staircase and round the landing and under the door of Bruno’s bedroom. Their voices were unusually loud and Bruno could only make out a few fragments of them:

‘…to leave Berlin. And for such a place…’ Mother was saying.

‘…no choice, at least not if we want to continue…’ said Father.

‘…as if it’s the most natural thing in the world and it’s not, it’s just not…’ said Mother.

‘…what would happen is I would be taken away and treated like a…’ said Father.

‘…expect them to grow up in a place like…’ said Mother.

‘…and that’s an end to the matter. I don’t want to hear another word on the subject…’ said Father.

That must have been the end of the conversation because Mother left Father’s office then and Bruno fell asleep.

A couple of days later he came home from school to find Maria standing in his bedroom, pulling all his belongings out of the wardrobe and packing them in four large wooden crates, even the things he’d hidden at the back that belonged to him and were nobody else’s business, and that is where the story began.

‘All I know is this,’ began Shmuel. ‘Before we came here I lived with my mother and father and my brother Josef in a small flat above the store where Papa makes his watches. Every morning we ate our breakfast together at seven o’clock and while we went to school, Papa mended the watches that people brought to him and made new ones too. I had a beautiful watch that he gave me but I don’t have it any more. It had a golden face and I wound it up every night before I went to sleep and it always told the right time.’

‘What happened to it?’ asked Bruno.

‘They took it from me,’ said Shmuel.

‘Who?’

‘The soldiers, of course,’ said Shmuel as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

‘And then one day things started to change,’ he continued. ‘I came home from school and my mother was making armbands for us from a special cloth and drawing a star on each one. Like this.’ Using his finger he drew a design in the dusty ground beneath him.

‘And every time we left the house, she told us we had to wear one of these armbands.’

‘My father wears one too,’ said Bruno. ‘On his uniform. It’s very nice. It’s bright red with a black-and-white design on it.’ Using his finger he drew another design in the dusty ground on his side of the fence.

‘Yes, but they’re different, aren’t they?’ said Shmuel.

‘No one’s ever given me an armband,’ said Bruno.

‘But I never asked to wear one,’ said Shmuel.

‘All the same,’ said Bruno, ‘I think I’d quite like one. I don’t know which one I’d prefer though, your one or Father’s.’

Shmuel shook his head and continued with his story. He didn’t often think about these things any more because remembering his old life above the watch shop made him very sad.

‘We wore the armbands for a few months,’ he said.

‘And then things changed again. I came home one day and Mama said we couldn’t live in our house any more-’

‘That happened to me too!’ shouted Bruno, delighted that he wasn’t the only boy who’d been forced to move. ‘The Fury came for dinner, you see, and the next thing I knew we moved here. And I hate it here,’ he added in a loud voice. ‘Did he come to your house and do the same thing?’

‘No, but when we were told we couldn’t live in our house we had to move to a different part of Cracow, where the soldiers built a big wall and my mother and father and my brother and I all had to live in one room.’

‘All of you?’ asked Bruno. ‘In one room?’

‘And not just us,’ said Shmuel. There was another family there and the mother and father were always fighting with each other and one of the sons was bigger than me and he hit me even when I did nothing wrong.’

‘You can’t have all lived in the one room,’ said Bruno, shaking his head. That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘All of us,’ said Shmuel, nodding his head. ‘Eleven in total.’

Bruno opened his mouth to contradict him again-he didn’t really believe that eleven people could live in the same room together-but changed his mind.

‘We lived there for some more months,’ continued Shmuel, ‘all of us in that one room. There was one small window in it but I didn’t like to look out of it because then I would see the wall and I hated the wall because our real home was on the other side of it. And this part of town was the bad part because it was always noisy and it was impossible to sleep. And I hated Luka, who was the boy who kept hitting me even when I did nothing wrong.’

‘Gretel hits me sometimes,’ said Bruno. ‘She’s my sister,’ he added. ‘And a Hopeless Case. But soon I’ll be bigger and stronger than she is and she won’t know what’s hit her then.’

Then one day the soldiers all came with huge trucks,’ continued Shmuel, who didn’t seem all that interested in Gretel. ‘And everyone was told to leave the houses. Lots of people didn’t want to and they hid wherever they could find a place but in the end I think they caught everyone. And the trucks took us to a train and the train…’ He hesitated for a moment and bit his lip. Bruno thought he was going to start crying and couldn’t understand why.

‘The train was horrible,’ said Shmuel. ‘There were too many of us in the carriages for one thing. And there was no air to breathe. And it smelled awful.’

‘That’s because you all crowded onto one train,’ said Bruno, remembering the two trains he had seen at the station when he left Berlin. ‘When we came here, there was another one on the other side of the platform but no one seemed to see it. That was the one we got. You should have got on it too.’

‘I don’t think we would have been allowed,’ said Shmuel, shaking his head. ‘We weren’t able to get out of our carriage.’

‘The doors are at the end,’ explained Bruno.

‘There weren’t any doors,’ said Shmuel.

‘Of course there were doors,’ said Bruno with a sigh. ‘They’re at the end,’ he repeated. ‘Just past the buffet section.’

‘There weren’t any doors,’ insisted Shmuel. ‘If there had been, we would all have got off.’

Bruno mumbled something under his breath along the lines of ‘Of course there were’, but he didn’t say it very loud so Shmuel didn’t hear.

‘When the train finally stopped,’ continued Shmuel, ‘we were in a very cold place and we all had to walk here.’

‘We had a car,’ said Bruno, out loud now.

‘And Mama was taken away from us, and Papa and Josef and I were put into the huts over there and that’s where we’ve been ever since.’

Shmuel looked very sad when he told this story and Bruno didn’t know why; it didn’t seem like such a terrible thing to him, and after all much the same thing had happened to him.

‘Are there many other boys over there?’ asked Bruno.

‘Hundreds,’ said Shmuel.