Boyne has earned his stripes as a teacher of Holocaust

WHEN author John Boyne lit a touch paper on Twitter last week, I doubt if he could have imagined running into such an auspicious adversary. His tweet concerned the crowded Auschwitz book market and made a reasonable argument: that if publishers were actively seeking titles ‘using the same three words, and then inserting a noun’, that the quality of the books would not be very high.

To illustrate his argument, he posted a photo of seven currently popular books: The Mistress of Auschwitz, The Brothers of Auschwitz, The Child of Auschwitz, The Sisters of Auschwitz, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Saboteur of Auschwitz.

To be honest, I have avoided the current logjam of Auschwitz books for just that reason – in the same way that I avoided those endless, ‘Ma, he (insert heartless action here)’ misery lit titles that dominated the Irish book market a few years back.

If there are that many of them, can any of them actually be very good?

But it was the response of the official Auschwitz Memorial’s Twitter account to Boyne’s tweet that surprised many – Boyne, I suspect, amongst them: ‘We understand those concerns, and we already addressed inaccuracies in some books published. However, [John Boyne’s book] The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.’

The Good Guys – because the official Auschwitz memorial are above reproach – were advising people to not read a children’s book that has given thousands of young people their introduction to man’s inhumanity to their fellow man.

Thankfully, their warning comes too late for my household.

My children – distracted by a raft of alternative media and shiny things generally – never broke any records for troubling the literary world, but all three of them read The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. The eldest read it in primary school, which prompted me to read it myself, and, as the younger children grew, to press it upon them as well. I won’t pretend that we conducted symposiums on it around the dinner table, but we did discuss the book once we’d all read it.

Later, in secondary school, they would learn the history of the Holocaust in all its bleak horror, but for me, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas served as a gateway for children to learn that atrocities happen and they involve real people with real beating hearts. They understood that John Boyne’s book was just a story and that the characters weren’t real, but I’ve long believed that the best way to tell any story – true or not – is to populate it with people readers can relate to.

JAMES Cameron had much the same idea when he made the film Titanic: if you really want people to appreciate the panic and terror of being on that doomed ship on the cold night, add fictional people like Rose and Jack to the passenger list. Nobody watching that film believes they are watching a true romance, but setting it on the Titanic makes the ship’s awful fate all the more tangible.

Storytellers make up stories. I do it myself. Frequently, where history and fiction collide, you will find pedants who insist it wasn’t so. Jim Sheridan was criticised for having Gerry Conlon and his father share a prison cell in In The Name Of The Father when they never did; Neil Jordan brought a tank into Croke Park where none had ever been. The Von Trapps escaped Nazioccupied Austria by catching a train, not by trekking across the Alps, aided and abetted by rogue nuns.

But all these works resonated with audiences in such a way that the real history behind them was rendered all the more powerful as a result. The Boy

In The Striped Pyjamas deserves to be read for the same reason – but because it is a children’s book, I would argue it’s even more important that children’s first encounter with the most appalling atrocity of the modern era be in a form they can understand.

If I was running the official Auschwitz Memorial Twitter account, I wouldn’t stress so much about the people studying and teaching the Holocaust. But I would suggest The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas be recommended reading for children who must – for the sake of a decent society – one day face the horrors of history. My two older children attended Holocaust memorial events for a couple of years after they read John Boyne’s book. I hope, in his current understandable withdrawal from social media, that somebody tells him that.