The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: Chapters 17–20

He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but they were talking quite loudly and he couldn’t help but overhear.

Grandmother was dead and they almost never heard from Grandfather, who Father said had gone senile.

‘But I think I’d miss people no matter where I went.’ That was an indirect reference to Shmuel but he didn’t want to make it any more explicit than that.

‘I’d prefer all four of us to stay together,’ he said, reluctantly including Gretel in that.

Bruno broke into a smile when he saw the figure coming towards him and he sat down on the ground, taking the piece of bread and the apple he had smuggled with him out of his pocket to give to Shmuel.

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ said Shmuel, which, to Bruno’s disappointment, was not a flat-out rejection of the offer.

‘Don’t you remember that you said I looked like you?’ he asked Shmuel. ‘Since I had my head shaved?’
‘Only fatter,’ conceded Shmuel.

His boots squelched in the mud and he started to enjoy the walk more than he ever had before.

Of course there would be the difficulty of explaining why he was so filthy later on when he returned home, but he could put that down to being a typical boy, which was what Mother claimed he was, and probably not get into too much trouble.

It didn’t look particularly clean but it was a disguise, and Bruno knew that good explorers always wore the right clothes.

Shmuel smiled too and the two boys stood awkwardly together for a moment, unaccustomed to being on the same side of the fence.

Instead there were crowds of people sitting together in groups, staring at the ground, looking horribly sad; they all had one thing in common: they were all terribly skinny and their eyes were sunken and they all had shaved heads, which Bruno thought must have meant there had been an outbreak of lice here too.

There was some sort of disturbance towards the back, where some people seemed unwilling to march, but Bruno was too small to see what happened and all he heard was loud noises, like the sound of gunshots, but he couldn’t make out what they were.

Father stayed at Out-With for another year after that and became very disliked by the other soldiers, whom he ordered around mercilessly.

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.