THE BOYS IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS

The Last Chapter

Nothing more was ever heard of Bruno after that.

Several days later, after the soldiers had searched every part of the house

and gone into all the local towns and villages with pictures of the little boy,

one of them discovered the pile of clothes and the pair of boots that Bruno

had left near the fence. He left them there, undisturbed, and went to fetch the

Commandant, who examined the area and looked to his left and looked to his

right just as Bruno had done, but for the life of him he could not understand

what had happened to his son. It was as if he had just vanished off the face of

the earth and left his clothes behind him.

Mother did not return to Berlin quite as quickly as she had hoped. She

stayed at Out-With for several months waiting for news of Bruno until one

day, quite suddenly, she thought he might have made his way home alone, so

she immediately returned to their old house, half expecting to see him sitting

on the doorstep waiting for her. He wasn't there, of course.

Gretel returned to Berlin with Mother and spent a lot of time alone in her

room crying, not because she had thrown her dolls away and not because she

had left all her maps behind at Out-With, but because she missed Bruno so

much.

Father stayed at Out-With for another year after that and became very

disliked by the other soldiers, whom he ordered around mercilessly. He went

thinking about him too. One day he formed a theory about what might have

occurred and he went back to the place in the fence where the pile of clothes

had been found a year before.

There was nothing particularly special about this place, or different, but

then he did a little exploration of his own and discovered that the base of the

fence here was not properly attached to the ground as it was everywhere else

and that, when lifted, it left a gap large enough for a very small person (such

as a little boy) to crawl underneath. He looked into the distance then and

followed it through logically, step by step by step, and when he did he found

that his legs seemed to stop working right-as if they couldn't hold his body up

any longer-and he ended up sitting on the ground in almost exactly the same position as Bruno had every afternoon for a year, although he didn't cross his

legs beneath him.

A few months after that some other soldiers came to Out-With and Father

was ordered to go with them, and he went without complaint and he was

happy to do so because he didn't really mind what they did to him any more.

And that's the end of the story about Bruno and his family. Of course all

this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again.

Not in this day and age.