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Why I Loathe ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’.

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bisp-rozie — From the Author’s collection.

Warning. This is kind of a long post.

WHY I LOATHE ‘THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS’ By Matthew Rozell | TeachingHistoryMatters.com [revised and updated from the ten-year-old original-most-read-post-on-this-blog, April 2026]

I want to start with an admission; I originally put off writing this post for a long time, because I was worried about coming across as a know-it-all — the teacher who can’t let people enjoy a book without turning it into a lesson. That is genuinely not my intention, and if it comes across that way at any point, I apologize in advance.

But something has kept happening at my book signings that I can no longer stay quiet about.

Time after time, someone picks up A Train Near Magdeburg mentions that they first learned about the Holocaust through The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and seems genuinely surprised — sometimes startled — when I mention that it is a work of fiction. Not based on a true story. Not a fictionalized account of real events. A fable — the author’s own word for it — written by Irish novelist John Boyne, who completed the first draft in roughly two and a half days.

One woman at a signing described scene after scene to me in vivid detail before I gently let her know that none of it had actually happened. She was grateful to be told. Another time I could predict what was coming before the person opened her mouth — sure enough: “It’s like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” I said, as kindly as I could: “But you know it isn’t true, right?” She did not.

I am not alone in finding this troubling, and I will get to what the scholars and major Holocaust institutions have actually said in a moment. But let me first explain the problem as plainly as I can, because I think every teacher, administrator, and parent who has encountered this book deserves a clear and honest accounting.

WHAT THE STORY IS — AND WHAT IT IS NOT

In the two decades since its release, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the 2006 novel by Irish writer John Boyne, has seemingly become a bellwether of sorts, some middle school rite of passage in “learning about the Holocaust”. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and it is the book that has ‘introduced’ millions to the subject, and apparently not just children, though it is used in tandem with the horrific 2008 film based on it in literally thousands of classrooms across the country. So, I’ll get right to it—

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is NOT a book about the Holocaust and to deploy it in the classroom to ‘introduce children to the subject of the Holocaust’ is pedagogically unsound on several levels.

For those who haven’t read it: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a 2006 novel subtitled A Fable, later made into a major film in 2008. It tells the story of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of a Nazi commandant who has just been placed in charge of Auschwitz. Bored and isolated at his new home near the camp, Bruno wanders the perimeter fence and strikes up a friendship with Shmuel, a Jewish boy on the other side. In the final scene, Bruno crawls under the wire, puts on a striped prisoner’s uniform, and is led with Shmuel into a gas chamber, where both boys are killed as Bruno’s frantic parents search helplessly outside.

The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold over 11 million copies worldwide, and has been used in thousands of middle school classrooms across the country. USA Today called it “as memorable an introduction to the subject as The Diary of Anne Frank.” For millions of young people — and, as I have learned at signing after signing, many adults — it has become their primary introduction to the Holocaust.

And that is very troubling to me as a trained Holocaust educator.

WHAT IS HISTORICALLY IMPOSSIBLE ABOUT IT

I want to be careful here, because I know that many teachers who have used this book care deeply about their students and are doing their best with limited time and resources. Nobody can be an expert in everything, and what follows is an observation, not an indictment of anyone’s intentions.

But the story is built on historical impossibilities, and teachers and parents deserve to know what they are.

Jewish children who arrived at Auschwitz were almost invariably sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival. They were not assigned to labor details, not given striped uniforms, not allowed to move about freely. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum’s own historical records, as a rule all children under sixteen were sent directly to be killed upon arrival. Of the more than 230,000 children deported to Auschwitz, only about 23,500 were ever registered as prisoners — meaning roughly 90% were murdered immediately, without ever being assigned a number, a uniform, or a place in the camp. They did not wander the grounds. They did not sit by the fence. They did not make friends. They were dead within hours of stepping off the train.The notion of a Jewish child sitting at the perimeter fence, bored and waiting for a friend, bears almost no relationship to how Auschwitz actually operated. The idea that the commandant’s young son could wander undetected through the camp, put on a prisoner’s uniform, and be herded into a gas chamber without a single guard recognizing him is not dramatic license. It is a fantasy.

Beyond the physical impossibilities, there is another problem the book glosses over entirely. Bruno and his family are depicted as essentially ignorant of the nature of what surrounds them — naive, sheltered, almost innocent bystanders. But as scholars have pointed out, a high-ranking Nazi officer’s family in 1942 would have been steeped in antisemitic ideology from birth. German children were indoctrinated through the Hitler Youth and the school curriculum. The idea that the commandant of Auschwitz had a son who knew nothing of the Final Solution, who called Hitler “the Fury” because he couldn’t pronounce Führer, is not charming naïveté. It is a profound misrepresentation of how ordinary Germans participated in, and were shaped by, the Nazi regime — and it lets them off the hook in ways that are historically and morally troubling.

Boyne has been honest about the gap between his story and historical reality. In a 2006 interview with Bookreporter.com, he explained that because he was changing aspects of concentration camp history to serve the story, he felt it was important not to pretend it could actually have happened. In his own words in the Irish Times, he has always described it as a fable — a story that relies more on moral truth than historical accuracy. That is a reasonable artistic position. The problem is that readers — especially young ones — do not always register what “fable” means, and they walk away believing they have just learned what the Holocaust looked like.

This matters enormously, because the Holocaust is already under relentless assault from people who deny it happened or call it exaggerated. Introducing the subject through a story its own author says prioritizes emotional truth over historical accuracy is, at minimum, a risk worth thinking very carefully about.

Holocaust Centre North in the United Kingdom is straightforward: there are many survivor accounts accessible to young readers, and novels more accurately grounded in fact, that teachers could and should use instead.

WHOSE GRIEF IS THIS, EXACTLY?

Here is what troubles me most, and it goes deeper than the historical details.

After the film’s final gas chamber scene circulated widely online, students began posting their reactions in the comments. I want you to read these carefully:

“My heart felt like it was getting slugged by a bowling ball when the mother was crying.”

“The sad part to me was when Bruno says ‘don’t worry we are just in here to get out of the rain.’ Poor boy.”

“I watched this in my school today and everybody cried.”

Notice who they are grieving for. Bruno — the German boy, the son of the commandant of Auschwitz. The story is so skillfully constructed around his innocence and his tragedy that many students finish it having shed their tears for the perpetrators’ family, while the Jewish victims remain, essentially, a backdrop. Where is Shmuel’s story? Who were his parents? What was his life before the deportation, the cattle car, the camp? What did he love, fear, dream about? The book has almost nothing to say about any of that, because Shmuel exists in the narrative primarily as a mechanism for delivering Bruno to his tragic end.

A New York City English teacher and Holocaust educator wrote in Chalkbeat that rather than centering actual Holocaust victims, the tragedy as the story sees it is that the protagonist was not supposed to be killed. By the end, readers are left feeling sorry for Bruno’s grief-stricken father — who was, to be clear, in charge of running Auschwitz. Jewish Chronicle columnist Tanya Gold wrote in her 2022 review that Jews in Boyne’s work are reduced to landscape rather than real characters — props to a writer’s vanity and his readers’ desire to experience the Holocaust through the prism of a fictional Nazi who cannot be harmed by it. “This is not memorialisation,” she wrote. “It is certainly not teaching. It is erasure.” New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis was equally unsparing, writing in her 2008 review of the film that it “trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked [the Holocaust] for a tragedy about a Nazi family.” It is an emotionally charged story. It is not an honest one — and some of the most respected voices in journalism and Holocaust scholarship have been saying so for years.

THE CRITICAL THINKING IRONY

Here is something that genuinely surprised me when I first came across it. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas appears in the New York State Common Core State Standards materials as a sample student essay — held up as a model of strong analytical writing. The essay compares the book to the film and concludes that the story is about “an incredible friendship that triumphed over racism.” It is presented as rigorous critical thinking.

Nowhere in that essay — nowhere in the entire assignment — is it acknowledged that either the book or the film is a work of fiction. The most basic question you can ask about any text used to teach history — is this actually true? — was never raised. The Common Core held this up as an exemplar of analytical excellence, and the fiction at its heart went entirely unexamined.

I have actually used TBITSP in my own classroom, but deliberately, and for the opposite purpose: to have students identify the historical fallacies embedded in the story and practice the critical thinking the Common Core assignment never actually required. That, I believe, is a legitimate use of the book. Using it as a sincere introduction to what the Holocaust actually was is a different matter entirely — and one that requires students to already have solid historical grounding before they can begin to interrogate the fiction they are reading. If they had that grounding, they would not need the book in the first place.

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY — AND NO, I AM NOT ALONE IN THINKING THIS

I want to be clear: the concerns I have been raising for years are not just one teacher’s opinion. The weight of serious Holocaust scholarship — and the judgment of the institutions built to preserve this history — falls squarely on one side of the debate.

Michael Gray, author of Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education and Teaching the Holocaust: Practical Approaches for Ages 11–18, conducted an empirical study of 298 students and published his findings in the peer-reviewed journal Holocaust Studies. His conclusion — and again, this is a scholar’s word, not mine — is that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is principally a curse for Holocaust education. That’s pretty strong language from a respected Holocaust educator. I know another who leads tours of the authentic sites of mass murder in Europe, whose own mother barely survived Auschwitz while her teenage sister was shot in the head in front of her for slipping on the ice and overturning a bucket of soup, who simply labels this story as “reprehensible”.

The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education — the leading Holocaust education research body in the United Kingdom — has published research finding that many young people draw mistaken and misleading conclusions about the Holocaust directly from their engagement with this story, and that over a third of teachers in England are still using it in their lessons. Their Programme Director Ruth-Anne Lenga has said directly: “As a work of fiction and drama this book and associated film may have some worth, but as a resource for teaching this important history it is flawed. The potential for giving young people the impression that ordinary Germans were in some way ‘victims’ of the Holocaust is insensitive and dangerous. With the rise in antisemitism, this book could potentially do more harm than good.”

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum — the institution built on the actual site where over a million people were murdered — stated publicly in January 2020 that the novel “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.” Their specific criticisms include the book’s portrayal of Jewish victims as one-dimensional, passive, and unresisting — a depiction that reinforces exactly the “sheep to the slaughter” narrative that the historical record so powerfully contradicts. That is not a mild reservation from a distant institution. That is the place where it happened telling educators: do not use this book.

The data on what students actually believe after reading this book is perhaps the most sobering finding of all. According to the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, the novel and the film are the most-read book and most-watched film about the Holocaust among students aged 12–18 — with 75% of students who had read anything about the Holocaust having read this book, and 84% of those who had watched anything having seen the film. Those numbers surpass Anne Frank’s diary by nearly 60 percent. A separate 2009 study by the London Jewish Cultural Centre found that 70% of readers thought the novel was based on a true story. And — this is the one that stays with me — many students believed that the death of Bruno brought about the end of the concentration camps.

Read that last sentence again. Students walked away from their Holocaust education believing that the death of a fictional German boy ended the concentration camps.

Art Spiegelman, author of Maus — the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir widely considered one of the most important works of literature of the past fifty years — was asked about the book at a public event in Chattanooga, Tennessee in February 2022. He said he had no objection to teachers replacing Maus with a different Holocaust book in their curriculum — so long as it wasn’t The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. “The guy didn’t do any research whatsoever,” Spiegelman said. Even Boyne himself, asked to compare the two books, acknowledged that Maus is “better, no question about that. And a much more important book.”

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum does not single out the book by name in its public teaching guidelines, but its framework for evaluating Holocaust texts and films is unambiguous: materials that oversimplify the Holocaust, represent only one perspective, distort historical reality, or risk conveying the impression that it was inevitable rather than the result of human choices should be avoided. Scholars have described the film specifically as a false narrative that can distort people’s understanding of the Holocaust. The USHMM’s teaching resources remain the gold standard for any educator approaching this subject, and I encourage every teacher and parent to consult them before selecting any classroom material on the Holocaust.

DO TEACHERS WHO STILL USE IT HAVE A POINT?

In fairness, I want to acknowledge the other side, because there are thoughtful people who disagree, and I do not think they are acting in bad faith. Good teachers have used this book and defended it, and their concern for their students is real.

Some educators argue that the book functions as a gateway — that it gets students emotionally invested in the Holocaust who might otherwise disengage, and that a skilled teacher can use that emotional opening to guide students toward more accurate material. Boyne himself has said he has always been clear with young readers that it is fiction, and that if it has encouraged some of them to explore the subject further, that is perhaps its most significant achievement. I understand that argument, and I don’t dismiss it out of hand.

But I think the gateway argument collapses when you look at the above data honestly. The research does not show students being led through this book toward deeper and more accurate understanding. It shows them leaving with fundamental misconceptions firmly in place — misconceptions that will need to be entirely dismantled before genuine learning about the Holocaust can begin. You cannot use a text to correct the misconceptions it is simultaneously creating. That is not a gateway; it is a sensationalistic detour around the more important discussions which saps classroom time we do not have.

And there is something else worth saying plainly. The Holocaust faces denial and distortion every single day, in classrooms, on social media, even in governments around the world. In that environment, introducing the subject with a story that frames German families as innocent victims of their own circumstances — that asks us to grieve most deeply for a Nazi perpetrator family’s child — is not just a pedagogical problem — it is a contribution to exactly the kind of muddying of the historical record that Holocaust deniers exploit. The UCL’s Ruth-Anne Lenga said it directly: with antisemitism on the rise, this book could do more harm than good.

There are better books. There are real stories. They are more powerful, more honest, and more respectful of the people who actually lived and died through this history.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offers free, extensive, age-appropriate teaching guidelines — including a rubric for evaluating any text or film under consideration for classroom use. I strongly encourage every teacher and parent to read them before choosing any Holocaust material. The USHMM suggests three guiding questions worth keeping close before selecting any text:

Why should students learn this history?
What are the most significant lessons they should take from studying the Holocaust?
Why is this particular book, image, or film the right medium for the topics you want to teach?

Those questions, applied honestly to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, provide their own answer.

For an annotated guide to appropriate Holocaust reading for students in grades four through eight, see Karen Shawn’s What Books Shall We Choose for Our Children? — available here as a PDF, with an article of mine beginning on page 94.

For serious teachers of the subject, Essentials of Holocaust Education: Fundamental Issues and Approaches by Totten and Feinberg (2016) is an invaluable guide to the whole field.

Additional classroom resources are available at TeachingHistoryMatters.com/teacher-resources.

A FINAL WORD

I lost a book sale the day I first published this post. The woman I was speaking with set my book down and walked away, and honestly, I understand. Nobody likes to be told that something they found moving is not what they thought it was, and I have never wanted this piece to feel like an attack on readers who loved the book or teachers who used it in good faith.

But here is what I keep coming back to, after decades of conversations with Holocaust survivors, liberators, and the families of both. The real children of Auschwitz — the ones who actually died there, whose names are on record, whose families were torn apart and destroyed — deserve to be known as themselves. Not as a backdrop for someone else’s story. Not as the supporting cast in a fable about a German boy’s innocence and a Nazi father’s grief. They deserve the full weight of honest history, told as carefully and truthfully as we can manage.

The Auschwitz Memorial said it. The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education said it. Holocaust Centre North said it. A peer-reviewed academic study called it a curse. Art Spiegelman said it. And I am saying it too — not because I think I am smarter than anyone, but because twenty years of sitting with survivors and listening to what they endured has taught me that their real stories are extraordinary enough. They do not need to be replaced by a fable. They do not need to be filtered through the grief of the people who ran the camps.

They kept their promise to remember and to bear witness. The least we can do is tell the truth.

Further reading and resources:

Matthew Rozell taught history and Holocaust studies at Hudson Falls High School in New York for over three decades. He is the author of A Train Near Magdeburg and the Things Our Fathers Saw series. The feature film A Train Near Magdeburg is in production, coming 2027. Visit MagdeburgTrain.com to follow its progress.

The books: matthewrozellbooks.com

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