The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a 2006 novel about the son of a fictional commandant of Auschwitz who befriends a Jewish inmate his own age, has been made into a film, a ballet and an opera. The hugely successful novel was described by its author, John Boyne, as a Holocaust “fable,” or morality tale, but it has faced sharp criticism by Holocaust educators and others in the Jewish community for distorting history and putting a feel-good overlay on a tragedy.  The book has been denounced by the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum for its inaccuracies and unrealistic imaginings of what Auschwitz would have been like both for Bruno, the Nazi commandant’s son, and Shmuel, the Jewish boy who Bruno befriends. The main gripe shared by many readers and reviewers is that the pathos of the novel...

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