THE BOYS IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS

What They Saw Through the Window

To begin with, they weren't children at all. Not all of them, at least. There

were small boys and big boys, fathers and grandfathers. Perhaps a few uncles

too. And some of those people who live on their own on everybody's road

but don't seem to have any relatives at all. They were everyone.

'Who are they?' asked Gretel, as open-mouthed as her brother often was

these days. 'What sort of place is this?'

'I'm not sure,' said Bruno, sticking as close to the truth as possible. 'But

it's not as nice as home, I do know that much.'

'And where are all the girls?' she asked. 'And the mothers? And the

grandmothers?'

'Perhaps they live in a different part,' suggested Bruno.

Gretel agreed. She didn't want to go on staring but it was very difficult to

turn her eyes away. So far, all she had seen was the forest facing her own

window, which looked a little dark but a good place for picnics if there was

any sort of clearing further along it. But from this side of the house the view

was very different.

It started off nicely enough. There was a garden directly beneath Bruno's

window. Quite a large one too, and full of flowers which grew in neat

orderly sections in soil that looked as if it was tended very carefully by

someone who knew that growing flowers in a place like this was something

good that they could do, like putting a tiny candle of light in the corner of a

huge castle on a misty moor on a dark winter's night.

Past the flowers there was a very pleasant pavement with a wooden

bench on it, where Gretel could imagine sitting in the sunshine and reading a

book. There was a plaque attached to the top of the bench but she couldn't

read the inscription from this distance. The seat was turned to face the housewhich, usually, would be a strange thing to do but on this occasion she could

understand why.

About twenty feet further along from the garden and the flowers and the

bench with the plaque on it, everything changed. There was a huge wire fence

that ran along the length of the house and turned in at the top, extending

further along in either direction, further than she could possibly see. The

fence was very high, higher even than the house they were standing in, and there were huge wooden posts, like telegraph poles, dotted along it, holding

it up. At the top of the fence enormous bales of barbed wire were tangled in

spirals, and Gretel felt an unexpected pain inside her as she looked at the

sharp spikes sticking out all the way round it.

There wasn't any grass after the fence; in fact there was no greenery

anywhere to be seen in the distance. Instead the ground was made of a sandlike substance, and as far as she could make out there was nothing but low

huts and large square buildings dotted around and one or two smoke stacks in

the distance. She opened her mouth to say something, but when she did she

realized that she couldn't find any words to express her surprise, and so she

did the only sensible thing she could think of and closed it again.

'You see?' said Bruno from the corner of the room, feeling quietly pleased

with himself because whatever it was that was out there-and whoever they

were-he had seen it first and he could see it whenever he wanted because

they were outside his bedroom window and not hers and therefore they

belonged to him and he was the king of everything they surveyed and she was

his lowly subject.

'I don't understand,' said Gretel. 'Who would build such a nasty-looking

place?'

'It is a nasty-looking place, isn't it?' agreed Bruno.

'I think those huts have only one floor too. Look how low they are.'

'They must be modern types of houses,' said Gretel. 'Father hates modern

things.'

'Then he won't like them very much,' said Bruno.

'No,' replied Gretel. She stood still for a long time staring at them. She

was twelve years old and was considered to be one of the brightest girls in

her class, so she squeezed her lips together and narrowed her eyes and

forced her brain to understand what she was looking at. Finally she could

think of only one explanation.

'This must be the countryside,' said Gretel, turning round to look at her

brother triumphantly. 'The countryside?'

'Yes, it's the only explanation, don't you see? When we're at home, in

Berlin, we're in the city. That's why there are so many people and so many

houses and the schools are full and you can't make your way through the

centre of town on a Saturday afternoon without getting pushed from pillar to

post.'

'Yes...' said Bruno, nodding his head, trying to keep up.

'But we learned in geography class that in the countryside, where all the

farmers are and the animals, and they grow all the food, there are huge areas

like this where people live and work and send all the food to feed us.' She

looked out of the window again at the huge area spread out before her and the

distances that existed between each of the huts. 'This must be it. It's the

countryside. Perhaps this is our holiday home,' she added hopefully.

Bruno thought about it and shook his head. 'I don't think so,' he said with

great conviction.

'You're nine,' countered Gretel. 'How would you know? When you get to

my age you'll understand these things a lot better.'

'That might be so,' said Bruno, who knew that he was younger but didn't

agree that that made him less likely to be right, 'but if this is the countryside

like you say it is, then where are all the animals you're talking about?'

Gretel opened her mouth to answer him but couldn't think of a suitable

reply, so she looked out of the window again instead and peered around for

them, but they were nowhere to be seen.

'There should be cows and pigs and sheep and horses,' said Bruno. 'If it

'And there aren't any,' admitted Gretel quietly.

'And if they grew food here, like you suggested,' continued Bruno,

enjoying himself enormously, 'then I think the ground would have to look a lot

better than that, don't you? I don't think you could grow anything in all that

dirt.'

Gretel looked at it again and nodded, because she was not so silly as to

insist on being in the right all the time when it was clear the argument stood

against her.

'Perhaps it's not a farm then,' she said.

'It's not,' agreed Bruno.

'Which means this mightn't be the countryside,' she continued.

'No, I don't think it is,' he replied.

'Which also means that this probably isn't our holiday home after all,' she

concluded.

'I don't think so,' said Bruno.

He sat down on the bed and for a moment wished that Gretel would sit

down beside him and put her arm around him and tell him that it was all

going to be all right and that sooner or later they'd get to like it here and

they'd never want to go back to Berlin. But she was still watching from the window and this time she wasn't looking at the flowers or the pavement or

the bench with the plaque on it or the tall fence or the wooden telegraph

poles or the barbed wire bales or the hard ground beyond them or the huts or

the small buildings or the smoke stacks; instead she was looking at the

people.

'Who are all those people?' she asked in a quiet voice, almost as if she

wasn't asking Bruno but looking for an answer from someone else. 'And what

are they all doing there?'

Bruno stood up, and for the first time they stood there together, shoulder

to shoulder, and stared at what was happening not fifty feet away from their

new home.

Everywhere they looked they could see people, tall, short, old, young, all

moving around. Some stood perfectly still in groups, their hands by thensides, trying to keep their heads up, as a soldier marched in front of them, his

mouth opening and closing quickly as if he were shouting something at them.

Some were formed into a sort of chain gang and pushing wheelbarrows from

one side of the camp to the other, appearing from a place out of sight and

taking their wheelbarrows further along behind a hut, where they disappeared

again. A few stood near the huts in quiet groups, staring at the ground as if it

was the sort of game where they didn't want to be spotted. Others were on

crutches and many had bandages around their heads. Some carried spades

and were being led by groups of soldiers to a place where they could no

longer be seen.

Bruno and Gretel could see hundreds of people, but there were so many

huts before them, and the camp spread out so much further than they could

possibly see, that it looked as though there must be thousands out there.

'And all living so close to us,' said Gretel, frowning.

'In Berlin, on our nice quiet street, we only had six houses. And now

there are so many. Why would Father take a new job here in such a nasty

place and with so many neighbours? It doesn't make any sense.'

'Look over there,' said Bruno, and Gretel followed the direction of the

finger he was pointing and saw, emerging from a hut in the distance, a group

of children huddled together and being shouted at by a group of soldiers. The

more they were shouted at, the closer they huddled together, but then one of

the soldiers lunged towards them and they separated and seemed to do what

he had wanted them to do all along, which was to stand in a single line.

When they did, the soldiers all started to laugh and applaud them 'It must be some sort of rehearsal,' suggested Gretel, ignoring the fact that

some of the children, even some of the older ones, even the ones as grown up

as her, looked as if they were crying.

'I told you there were children here,' said Bruno.

'Not the type of children J want to play with,' said Gretel in a determined

voice. 'They look filthy. Hilda and Isobel and Louise have a bath every

morning and so do I. Those children look like they've never had a bath in

their lives.'

'It does look very dirty over there,' said Bruno. 'But maybe they don't

have any baths?'

'Don't be stupid,' said Gretel, despite the fact that she had been told time

and time again that she was not to call her brother stupid. 'What kind of

people don't have baths?'

'I don't know,' said Bruno. 'People who don't have any hot water?'

Gretel watched for another few moments before shivering and turning

away. 'I'm going back to my room to arrange my dolls,' she said. 'The view is

decidedly nicer from there.'

With that remark she walked away, returning across the hallway to her

bedroom and closing the door behind her, but she didn't go back to arranging

her dolls quite yet. Instead she sat down on the bed and a lot of things went

through her head.

And one final thought came into her brother's head as he watched the

hundreds of people in the distance going about their business, and that was

the fact that all of them-the small boys, the big boys, the fathers, the

grandfathers, the uncles, the people who lived on their own on everybody's

road but didn't seem to have any relatives at all-were wearing the same

clothes as each other: a pair of grey striped pyjamas with a grey striped cap

on their heads.

'How extraordinary,' he muttered, before turning away.