The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Gretel, but she said this slowly because she had discovered something unusual in her hair and was examining it carefully.
    ‘Well, can’t someone just get them together and—’
    Bruno was interrupted by the sound of Gretel breaking into a piercing scream; one that woke Mother up from her afternoon nap and brought her running into the bedroom to find out which of her children had murdered the other one.
    While experimenting with her hair Gretel had found a tiny egg, no bigger than the top of a pin. She showed it to Mother, who looked through her hair, pulling strands of it apart quickly, before marching over to Bruno and doing the same thing to him.
    ‘Oh, I don’t believe it,’ said Mother angrily. ‘I knew something like this would happen in a place like this.’
    It turned out that both Gretel and Bruno had lice in their hair, and Gretel had to be treated with a special shampoo that smelled horrible and afterwards she sat in her room for hours on end, crying her eyes out.
    Bruno had the shampoo as well, but then Father decided that the best thing was for him to start afresh and he got a razor and shaved all Bruno’s hair off, which made Bruno cry. It didn’t take long and he hated seeing all his hair float down from his head and land on the floor at his feet, but Father said it had to be done.
    Afterwards Bruno looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and he felt sick. His entire head looked misshapen now that he was bald and his eyes looked too big for his face. He was almost scared of his own reflection.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Father reassured him. ‘It’ll grow back. It’ll only take a few weeks.’
    ‘It’s the filth around here that did it,’ said Mother. ‘If some people could only see the effect this place is having on us all.’
    When he saw himself in the mirror Bruno couldn’t help but think how much like Shmuel he looked now, and he wondered whether all the people on that side of the fence had lice as well and that was why all their heads were shaved too.
    When he saw his friend the next day Shmuel started to laugh at Bruno’s appearance, which didn’t do a lot for his dwindling self-confidence.
    ‘I look just like you now,’ said Bruno sadly, as if this was a terrible thing to admit.
    ‘Only fatter,’ admitted Shmuel.

Chapter Seventeen

Mother Gets Her Own Way
    Over the course of the next few weeks Mother seemed increasingly unhappy with life at Out-With and Bruno understood perfectly well why that might be. After all, when they’d first arrived he had hated it, due to the fact that it was nothing like home and lacked such things as three best friends for life. But that had changed for him over time, mostly due to Shmuel, who had become more important to him than Karl or Daniel or Martin had ever been. But Mother didn’t have a Shmuel of her own. There was no one for her to talk to, and the only person who she had been remotely friendly with – the young Lieutenant Kotler – had been transferred somewhere else.
    Although he tried not to be one of those boys who spends his time listening at keyholes and down chimneys, Bruno was passing by Father’s office one afternoon while Mother and Father were inside having one of their conversations. He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but they were talking quite loudly and he couldn’t help but overhear.
    ‘It’s horrible,’ Mother was saying. ‘Just horrible. I can’t stand it any more.’
    ‘We don’t have any choice,’ said Father. ‘This is our assignment and—’
    ‘No, this is your assignment,’ said Mother. ‘ Your assignment, not ours. You stay if you want to.’
    ‘And what will people think,’ asked Father, ‘if I permit you and the children to return to Berlin without me? They will ask questions about my commitment to the work here.’
    ‘Work?’ shouted Mother. ‘You call this work?’
    Bruno didn’t hear much more because the voices were getting closer to the door and there was always a chance that Mother would come storming out in search of a medicinal sherry, so he ran back upstairs instead. Still, he had heard enough to know that there was a chance they might be returning to Berlin, and to his surprise he didn’t know how to feel about that.
    There was one part of him that remembered that he had loved his own life back there, but so many things would have changed by now. Karl and the other two best friends whose names he couldn’t remember would probably have forgotten about him by now. Grandmother was