The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

like Pavel and unlike Lieutenant Kotler.)
    ‘Well, I know I was born on April the fifteenth nineteen thirty-four—’ said Bruno.
    ‘Not your history,’ interrupted Herr Liszt. ‘Not your own personal history. I mean the history of who you are, where you come from. Your family’s heritage. The Fatherland.’
    Bruno frowned and considered it. He wasn’t entirely sure that Father had any land, because although the house in Berlin was a large and comfortable house, there wasn’t very much garden space around it. And he was old enough to know that Out-With did not belong to them, despite all the land there. ‘Not very much,’ he admitted finally. ‘Although I know quite a bit about the Middle Ages. I like stories about knights and adventures and exploring.’
    Herr Liszt made a hissing sound through his teeth and shook his head angrily. ‘Then this is what I am here to change,’ he said in a sinister voice. ‘To get your head out of your storybooks and teach you more about where you come from. About the great wrongs that have been done to you.’
    Bruno nodded and felt quite pleased by this as he assumed that he would finally be given an explanation for why they had all been forced to leave their comfortable home and come to this terrible place, which must have been the greatest wrong ever committed to him in his short life.
    Sitting alone in his room a few days later, Bruno started thinking about all the things he liked to do at home that he hadn’t been able to do since he had come to Out-With. Most of them came about because he no longer had any friends to play with, and it wasn’t as if Gretel would ever play with him. But there was one thing that he was able to do on his own and that he had done all the time back in Berlin, and that was exploring.
    ‘When I was a child,’ Bruno said to himself, ‘I used to enjoy exploring. And that was in Berlin, where I knew everywhere and could find anything I wanted with a blindfold on. I’ve never really done any exploring here. Perhaps it’s time to start.’
    And then, before he could change his mind, Bruno jumped off his bed and rummaged in his wardrobe for an overcoat and an old pair of boots – the kind of clothes he thought a real explorer might wear – and prepared to leave the house.
    There was no point doing any exploring inside. After all, this wasn’t like the house in Berlin, which he could just about remember had hundreds of nooks and crannies, and strange little rooms, not to mention five floors if you counted the basement and the little room at the top with the window he needed to stand on tiptoes to see through. No, this was a terrible house for exploration. If there was any to be done it would have to be done outside.
    For months now Bruno had been looking out of his bedroom window at the garden and the bench with the plaque on it, the tall fence and the wooden telegraph poles and all the other things he had written to Grandmother about in his most recent letter. And as often as he had watched the people, all the different kinds of people in their striped pyjamas, it had never really occurred to him to wonder what it was all about.
    It was as if it were another city entirely, the people all living and working together side by side with the house where he lived. And were they really so different? All the people in the camp wore the same clothes, those pyjamas and their striped cloth caps too; and all the people who wandered through his house (with the exception of Mother, Gretel and him) wore uniforms of varying quality and decoration and caps and helmets with bright red-and-black armbands and carried guns and always looked terribly stern, as if it was all very important really and no one should think otherwise.
    What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pyjamas and which people wore the uniforms?
    Of course sometimes the two groups mixed. He’d often seen the people from his side of the fence on the other side of the fence, and when he watched it was clear that they were in charge. The pyjama people all jumped to attention whenever the soldiers approached and sometimes they fell to the ground and sometimes they didn’t even get up and had to be carried away instead.
    It’s funny that I’ve never wondered about those people, Bruno thought. And it’s funny that when you think of all the times the soldiers go over there – and he had even seen Father go over there on many