Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a touching tale of an odd friendship between two boys in horrendous circumstances and a reminder of human’s capacity for inhumanity. The 2006 novel is also adapted into a film, which created controversy over the fictionalizing of the Holocaust. During the Second World War, the Nazis murdered nearly six million European Jews, a genocide known as the Holocaust. The word ‘Holocaust’ comes from ancient Greek, meaning ‘burnt offering’. Even before the Second World War, the word is used to describe the death of a large group of people, but since 1945, it has become almost synonymous with the murder of European Jews during the war. Jews also refer to the Holocaust as ‘Shoah’, which is Hebrew for ‘catastrophe’.