The Boy In The Striped Pajamas by John Boyne ... and a little more

Am I allowed to say a book is beautifully written if it's this sad? And also this controversial? I might be a little late jumping in the bandwagon but I don't watch a lot of movies so I never knew they made one out of this until I saw the cover. Also, for some reason I decided to watch the movie before finishing the book. It might have ruined the shock value for me but the sadness and everything that goes along with the word sadness was still there. It's actually still here, ugh! 

I bought this book just because I wanted something to read while waiting for a friend and when he saw me reading it he said, that's a kids' book. I just shrugged. In a way he was right. The way it was written was made to be something you would read to kids but the content, the heaviness of it, wasn't. I knew it was about the holocaust and I've read a few books about the holocaust and know of it so of course I already know it's not going to be a happy one. 

On a more technical note, if I hadn't read stories based on the holocaust before, I wouldn't have completely understood what took place in the end of this story unless I do a little research. In the movie, the guards were heard saying "it's only a shower". In the book they weren't even asked to strip. The were crammed in a room but how do I know that they were burned alive?

I think it's important to mention that I came from a faraway (heh) country and from a time (now) that's much much better than that era. I don't have any relatives or close acquaintances who suffered during that time. Now, there was a little issue about something that people, that I know, wrote a few years back that offended a few people within our professional circle. I mentioned "close acquaintances" because I never knew these people worked within arms reach. They had relatives who lived (some didn't) through that time. The argument of the involved parties was that what was written was only distantly related to this issue. I think it's essential that authors write about what happened for that reason. And I think it's essential that people, like me, read them. Because we need to have at least a little idea of what took place so we can try to understand why certain people react about something that happened a long long time ago. That way we can be a bit more sensitive, or at least thoughtful, about it.

The author's note at the end of the book says: "... only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy way to make sense of it all."