Boyne's 'Pajamas' was an old idea

Novelist

John Boyne

traces the origins of his Holocaust novel, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" to his days stocking shelves in a Dublin bookstore.

"Anytime a new, important work of nonfiction related to the Holocaust was published, I read it. I've always had a keen interest in the subject, from the time I was 15 or so, and it's stayed with me to this day," said Boyne, an Irishman who recently toured the states to help promote the film version of his book.

Still, he hadn't thought of attempting his own Holocaust story. The subject was just too daunting. One day, though, an image popped into his head. Two boys sitting on either side of a barbed- wire fence. The image became an idea, and Boyne sat down to write a story. He worked breathlessly until he'd finished "Pajamas," the story of a German officer's son who befriends a Jewish boy in a concentration camp. It imagines how a child might view a death camp, but it does not turn away from the grim reality of the experience. Preserving the essence of the Holocaust, he said, was paramount.

"It's the first thing you think about, the statements by survivors that if you weren't there, don't write about it," Boyne said.

"The problem with those comments is that if you take them literally, then 20 years from now, no one will ever write about the Holocaust. In my travels related to the book, every survivor I've met, and every victim, has said that people should write about it. We need to keep educating ourselves on the subject." *

- Gary Thompson