The author of The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas has pushed back against criticism of his novel, declaring that people should not read fiction if they are in search of facts. Dublin-born writer John Boyne, 53, has come under repeat criticism from Jewish groups and historians over his 2006 children’s book, which depicts the tragic friendship of a young Auschwitz prisoner and the son of an SS officer during the Holocaust. Boyne’s novel was adapted into a 2008 film starring Asa Butterfield (of Sex Education fame) as eight-year-old Bruno, who thinks the prisoners are wearing pyjamas and is blithely unaware of what is taking place in the camps.
“I think that the current climate that we’re living in, in publishing, is very nervous of anything that could potentially be controversial,” Boyne told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “My view on that book, and I have listened to a lot of the criticism, I’ve taken it in, some of it I understand, some of it I don’t understand it, but what I feel about it is that it is a novel, it’s subtitled a fable, a work of fiction with a moral at the centre. “It was never pretending to be anything more than that.
If you want the facts of the Holocaust, don’t read a novel, read a non-fiction work.” A study by the London Jewish Cultural Centre found that 70 per cent of readers thought it was based on a true story, and that the death of the two boys in the gas chambers of Auschwitz saw the end of the Holocaust. Boyne’s novel has a.
