English Comparison Essay Example: the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne and the Holocaust
Brianda Tamez
McGilchrist
ENG4U-01
October 30th, 2012
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and the Holocaust
Author John Boyne published his infamous novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. John Boyne was born in Dublin, Ireland. Boyne attended Trinity College in Dublin where he first studied English Literature and then proceeded to the University of East Anglia in Norwich where he then studied creative writing. He began his published writing career in the year two-thousand with his first published book The Thief of Time. Though The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas separates itself from Boyne’s traditional style of writing by having being written for a younger audience, it was the book that took John Boyne’s career to the successful point it is now at. Using his father’s date of birth as the same for both Shmuel and Bruno, Boyne could further relate the two boys to a familiar story. Demonstrating the truly catastrophic events of the Holocaust in a fictional novel, Boyne captures the torment that two young boys face in a time where their innocence is taken away by one of the most evil acts of humanity. The Holocaust caused the lives of six million Jews to be lost, and the faith of the survivors. The Nazi Germans called this systematic mass killing “the final solution to the Jewish question.” In nineteen-thirty-three, Anti-Semitism reached its’ peak in Germany “…destruction, which was launched with torchlight parades and accented by speeches that proclaimed the death of "Jewish intellectualism" and the purification of German culture. Thus, writings by such Jewish intellectuals as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud fueled the huge bonfires. Also engulfed in flames was the work of Heinrich Heine, a German poet of Jewish origin. A century earlier Heine had stated, "Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." …. his statement would become [true], specifically for the European Jews who found themselves under Nazi domination during the Third
McGilchrist
ENG4U-01
October 30th, 2012
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and the Holocaust
Author John Boyne published his infamous novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. John Boyne was born in Dublin, Ireland. Boyne attended Trinity College in Dublin where he first studied English Literature and then proceeded to the University of East Anglia in Norwich where he then studied creative writing. He began his published writing career in the year two-thousand with his first published book The Thief of Time. Though The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas separates itself from Boyne’s traditional style of writing by having being written for a younger audience, it was the book that took John Boyne’s career to the successful point it is now at. Using his father’s date of birth as the same for both Shmuel and Bruno, Boyne could further relate the two boys to a familiar story. Demonstrating the truly catastrophic events of the Holocaust in a fictional novel, Boyne captures the torment that two young boys face in a time where their innocence is taken away by one of the most evil acts of humanity. The Holocaust caused the lives of six million Jews to be lost, and the faith of the survivors. The Nazi Germans called this systematic mass killing “the final solution to the Jewish question.” In nineteen-thirty-three, Anti-Semitism reached its’ peak in Germany “…destruction, which was launched with torchlight parades and accented by speeches that proclaimed the death of "Jewish intellectualism" and the purification of German culture. Thus, writings by such Jewish intellectuals as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud fueled the huge bonfires. Also engulfed in flames was the work of Heinrich Heine, a German poet of Jewish origin. A century earlier Heine had stated, "Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." …. his statement would become [true], specifically for the European Jews who found themselves under Nazi domination during the Third