The issues are that a) it is horseshit and b) the author KNOWS that it's horseshit and yet is writing another book.
Let's address those one by one, but first a bit of background:
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a novel by the Irish writer John Boyne, was published in 2006. To quote Boyne's website,
Nine year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution or the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process. [NOTE: He's "subsumed" because he accidentally follows Shmuel into the gas chambers.]
The book sold millions of copies in 46 languages, won several awards and was shortlisted for a few more, and in 2008 it was made into a movie (with Bruno played by Asa Butterfield, now better known as Otis from Sex Education on Netflix) which was also very popular. Though the book and film were commercially successful, they got mixed reviews- some loved the message and felt that it was an effective way to introduce children to the idea of the Holocaust, and others... very much did not. (We'll get to them in a minute.)
Not only were people reading the book and watching the movie for entertainment- it became a very popular option in the classroom as well for Holocaust education. In the UK, the movie's distributors aggressively marketed it in schools (as Spielberg had with Schindler's List)- which made it unsurprising when a research study in the UK uncovered that, of their sample of several hundred 13- and 14-year old students in the London area, 75% had read the book or seen the movie, compared to 45% for The Diary of Anne Frank and 9% for Schindler's List. While it might be natural for Schindler's List, an R rated film, not to have been seen by young teens, the fact that nearly twice as many students had been exposed to a fictional work about the Holocaust than a (very popular and well-read) memoir by a victim was remarked upon. (One interesting note- more girls than boys read Anne Frank, more boys than girls watched Schindler's List, but equal numbers of boys and girls read/watched Striped Pajamas.)
What was more remarkable than the outsized popularity of the book and movie was the fact that the students surveyed believed that it was based on true events, and therefore educational, and praised it for the amount of information they learned. One student even believed that the plot of the book/movie (German son of a high up Nazi official killed in the camps accidentally) was explicitly based on a true story. But even the majority of the students who understood that the book/movie were fictional stated that they learned about the Holocaust from it. Indeed, the students indicated that the part of the Holocaust that they were most familiar with was the concentration camps, and on both the surveys and in in-person interviews multiple students explicitly referred to concentration camp uniforms as "pajamas" or "striped pajamas."
Some of this information was accurate, if skewed by the book- at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter THAT much whether you call the uniforms pajamas or not. But students were also gaining incorrect/misleading impressions of the Holocaust from the book. While some were flagrant, like "I think [the Holocaust] ended when one of the Nazi children died in the poisonous gas in the Jew camp," others were similarly problematic, with claims such as:
- that Bruno's mother (as the wife of the commander) wouldn't have known what was going on in the camp, and by extension that even the adults didn't know what was happening
- that the camps were advertised as vacation camps, the Jews chose to go there, and then it wasn't what was advertised (this is apparently based on a scene in the film, not the book)
- that Auschwitz was in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization
- that Jewish Sonderkommando were involved in closing the victims in the gas chambers, and that they did it for "extra food and protection"
None of the above is accurate. We know that the wives of camp officials were perfectly aware of what was going on, and there is no reason to believe they wouldn't be- it took many thousands of people's complicity and cooperation to enable the mass extermination of the Holocaust. While one particular camp (Theresienstadt/Terezin) was staged to seem like a "model camp" for children and the elderly, no other camps- including Auschwitz- were positioned as such, and certainly the Jews did not go willingly. Auschwitz (or Oswiecim) was a large town on several rail lines in Southern Poland, far from "the middle of nowhere." The Sonderkommando for the most part only disposed of victims' bodies- they didn't actually kill them- and they did so because their lives were at stake.
All of the above is just one particular study that was done about the
effects of the book/film on students' knowledge of the Holocaust. The actual inaccuracies go deeper. There would be no way that a son of a German commander like Bruno wouldn't know who Hitler (who he calls the "Fury" because he mishears the word "Fuhrer") was or that he wouldn't have been indoctrinated for literally his entire school life (not to mention home life) against Jews. It would be nearly impossible for a nine year old boy like Shmuel to not only survive even ONE day at Auschwitz (most children were gassed on arrival) but certainly for him to wander around at the perimeter to meet with Bruno. (In the book, Shmuel says that there are "lots" of them.) Even if Shmuel had survived as long as he does in the book/movie, he would have been absolutely emaciated given the conditions. At its core, the entire premise of the book makes no sense and is ahistorical.
Fundamentally, Striped Pajamas gives readers the impression not only that the Holocaust was perpetuated secretly, with innocence and ignorance a plausible possibility, but that even
antisemitism wasn't the inherent and well-publicized part of Nazi ideology that it in fact was. In truth, antisemitism and anti-Jewish laws were baked in with Hitler's overall rise, and many Germans benefited directly or indirectly as Jewish property was seized, industries were Aryanized... The book tries to make a statement about how ignorance can mean complicity by pretending that German complicity came from ignorance.
Boyne calls the story "a fable," and never explicitly names Auschwitz as a real place- however, he implies it so strongly (with the supposedly misheard name "out-with") that it becomes extremely clear that the story is set in a real place. However, it is set at such a far remove from any of the realities of that place that at the end of the day it serves to obfuscate not just the horrors of the Holocaust (as you might have noted in reading the above, all of these errors soften the reader's idea of what happened, apparently in the name of seeing it through the eyes of a naive nine year old) but the actual realities of what happened. Not to mention that "fables" are generally supposed to be analogies, ways of helping us understand concepts- trying to make us understand the concept of innocence and ignorance using a purposely distorted version of a historical event doesn't work too well.
Now, in theory, as a purely fictional work... I don't think that it specifically helps the world to have historical fiction books that take such tremendous liberties with the facts, especially on this topic in a world with so much Holocaust denial in which even the minutest JAQ-ing off "questions" about the invention of ballpoint pens are used in order to imply that Anne Frank's diary is a hoax. Plus, capitalizing on the Holocaust, a "popular" and attention-grabbing topic, by completely distorting its realities is kind of disrespectful. But sure, if an adult wants to read a fictional book that they know is fiction, and know is inaccurate... whatever. The problem is that it's not generally adults reading it- it's children. And not just for entertainment but as part of Holocaust education curricula. Even if a goal of Holocaust education is moral/ethical, it must still be predicated on actual historical facts.
One additional major distortion in the story is who the story is about. It's about Bruno and his family- Shmuel doesn't appear until Chapter 10- and they are much more developed as people than Shmuel is. By centering the story around Bruno and the (false) impressions of his naivete and his mother's ignorance and his father's "just doing his job for the war effort"ness (in the movie- in the book he is a much more menacing figure), the true tragedy of the book is Bruno's death, not the tragedy of the Holocaust. As was noted in one of the works I used to write this (works cited will be at the bottom of the post), if you rewrite the story to have a happy ending, it involves someone saving Bruno from the gas chambers at the last minute. Shmuel will still die. All the others in the camp will still die. The Holocaust isn't a horror for Bruno's family until one of their own dies, and even then...
In the recent media event about a Tennessee school district removing Maus from the curriculum, a point was repeatedly made that the Holocaust should be taught through works that center victims and survivors. This makes a lot of sense- doing this not only puts them at the forefront but also humanizes these people. (When I interned at a Holocaust museum in college, nobody made it to the second-floor Holocaust exhibit until they'd seen the first-floor exhibit containing artifacts of prewar Jewish life not just in Europe but around the world.) And there are plenty of great books that do this, like Maus, Night, and Anne Frank. There is definitely a place for younger-grade books like Number the Stars, which centers a non-Jewish protagonist but is clearly researched and empathetic to the Jews featured in it. But Striped Pajamas manages none of this- it is badly-researched, its Jewish character is a token and a vehicle for the self-growth of the German main character, and the tragedy of the book isn't the mass murder of the Holocaust but the accidental death of one German boy as a result.
And after all that, I've only addressed Point A. Point B is that John Boyne KNOWS that the book is horseshit.
In January 2020, riding high on the rep that comes from writing such a popular "Holocaust novel," John Boyne tweeted this (now-deleted) opinion about the titling of Holocaust books (as in "The ____ of Auschwitz"):
I can't help but feel that by constantly using the same three words, & then inserting a noun, publishers & writers are effectively building a genre that sells well, when in reality the subject matter, & their titles, should be treated with a little more thought & consideration.
I have no idea what the reaction to this particular opinion was (...he's annoyingly and hypocritically correct, in my opinion). The Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter account then responded with
We understand those concerns, and we already addressed inaccuracies in some books published. However, "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.
Boyne then responded that there were a few errors in the article that the Auschwitz Memorial's tweet linked to, probably related to details of the timeline of the movie release. He did not bother to address any of the other concerns about the book's errors. Since, according to his Twitter bio, Boyne "[doesn't]engage with any online negativity," it's unlikely he ever will. He has publicly stated that he wrote the first draft of the book in two and a half days, though he says he did supplemental research on top of that, and to the best of my knowledge has never really addressed the many, many, many criticisms by scholars and educators as to his book and its (lack of) value.
(Edited to add:) Let's also note that Boyne has been a public-facing victim of terrible research in other contexts as well. In his historical fiction novel The Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, in a scene set in the time of Attila the Hun, a description of the formulation of a red dye is included which raised many eyebrows- because it came straight out of the game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
This thread showed that it was unlikely to be a mistake- the
first result you get when typing "ingredients red dye clothes" is that very Legend of Zelda formulation, right above a webpage title making it very clear that it's from the game.
Boyne's reply is by now deleted in the original thread but essentially came down to "lol, my bad, I Googled it, I'm leaving it in because it's funny." Which, whatever else you may think about it, doesn't exactly indicate a dedication to fidelity to historical fact in Boyne's
historical fiction novels.
And now he's coming out with a sequel to Striped Pajamas which immediately raises my eyebrows- centering it around Bruno's now elderly older sister and her feelings of guilt. I wonder, guilt over what exactly? And why do we need another Holocaust novel centering Germans from someone who has already proven how bad he is at it?
CITED:
Gray, "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Blessing or Curse for Holocaust Education?"
Cesarani, "Striped Pyjamas"
https://www.het.org.uk/images/downloads/Resources/Teaching_the_Holocaust_in_English.pdf