The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

• By John Boyne

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Background Notes

• Setting
• World War II outside of Berlin, Germany estate
  outside of Auschwitz
• Time 1940-1945
• Characters
• Gretel
• Bruno
• the Commandant (Father)
• Schmuel
• Out-With, Auschwitz
• Lt. Kotler,
• The Fury

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• Auschwitz
• Auschwitz (German Konzentrationslager Auschwitz
  'a??v?ts  ( listen)) was a network of
  concentration and extermination camps built and
  operated in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany
  during the Second World War. It was the largest
  of the German concentration camps, consisting of
  Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or base camp)
  Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or
  extermination camp) Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also
  known as Buna-Monowitz (a labor camp) and 45
  satellite camps.1

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• Auschwitz is the German name for Oswiecim, the
  town in and around which the camps were located
  it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded
  Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German
  translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to
  a small Polish village nearby that was mostly
  destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.

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• Reichsführer and Germany's Minister of the
  Interior, as the place of the "final solution of
  the Jewish question in Europe". From spring 1942
  until the fall of 1944, transport trains
  delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from
  all over Nazi-occupied Europe.2 The camp's
  first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after
  the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three
  million people had died there (2.5 million
  gassed, and 500,000 from disease and
  starvation),3 a figure since revised to 1.1
  million, around 90 percent of them Jews

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• .4 Others deported to Auschwitz included
  150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000
  Soviet prisoners of war, and tens of thousands of
  people of diverse nationalities.5 Those not
  killed in the gas chambers died of starvation,
  forced labor, lack of disease control, individual
  executions, and medical experiments.6