LAST YEAR I TOOK PART IN A public reading with a couple of other novelists, after which members of the audience quizzed us on our methods and beliefs as we set out to write a new book. One questioner — a writer who tends to exploit whatever is contemporary — insisted that the only thing of value in novel-writing was to consider the lives of adults today; there was nothing to be gained by looking towards either the past or the young. I’d never heard such rubbish.

The youngest survivors of the Holocaust, the event for which the past hundred years will be most remembered and despised, are reaching the end of their lives. Society makes sure to keep their stories alive — organisations such as the Shoah Foundation, based at the University of Southern California, have been scrupulously collecting the testimonies of survivors for many years — but fiction writers are often less comfortable with dramatising these events, and when it comes to the stories of the children who have suffered the worst impulses of man, there are even fewer whose voices have been heard.

Truthfully, it’s a difficult subject for any novelist; it is presumptuous to assume that from today’s perspective one can truly understand the horrors of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen or Dachau, although it is the responsibility of any writer who chooses to base a narrative in those places to uncover as much emotional truth within that desperate landscape as he possibly can. In doing so, one looks for the best way to tell the story and often it is through the experiences of children that the themes can best be developed.

The slow but determined breakdown of society has always been fertile ground for novelists and by focusing on the involvement of children at such times, either as victims or perpetrators, participants or bystanders, one can focus directly on specific aspects while ignoring issues that adults perceive as wholly important but which children do not even recognise and which, from a purely technical point of view, are surplus to requirements. William Golding famously made the young protagonists of Lord of the Flies pre-pubescent, because the scourges of adolescent sexuality were not the concern of that novel and could be jettisoned in a way that would have been impossible with adults alone on that island.

I remember being tremendously moved as a child by Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword, one of the few children’s novels to which I returned in my early twenties, at which point I was surprised to discover how much I had missed in my original reading. I remembered a story of great friendship between four children, and the heroics of their leader Jan in particular; what I discovered was a brutally effective tale of innocents left to survive in a Poland torn apart by the war. However, the fact that I didn’t know much as a ten-year-old about concentration camps or genocide didn’t detract from the story for me originally; if anything, it kept it alive in my head and made me want to rediscover it later, aware that there were many things in there that I wanted to know more about.

Perhaps this is a good aim for a novelist writing for young people about difficult subjects. I’ve been asked several times whether The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a suitable book for children to read and my answer is that while there will be some elements that they will not understand as much as others, I hope that they will be sufficiently moved by the narrative, while identifying with both Bruno and Shmuel (the young German and Jewish protagonists) that they will be left asking questions, wanting to know more, keeping the subject alive.

It goes almost without saying that the issue of writing about the Holocaust in a children’s book is contentious and any novelists who tackle it had better be sure about their intentions before they begin.

For me, a 34-year-old Irish writer, it seemed that the only respectful way to deal with such a subject was through innocence, using the point of view of a rather naive child who couldn’t possibly understand the horrors of what he was caught up in. After all, that naiveté is as close as someone of my generation can get to the dreadfulness of that time and place. Why am I here? Bruno wonders. What happens in this place? Why are there so many people on the other side of the fence? Simple questions, perhaps, but at a basic level, aren’t these the questions we still ask? A simple “Why?” And perhaps that’s the job for any writer or artist, to keep looking for answers, to make sure those questions continue so that no one ever forgets why they needed to be raised in the first place.

Despite all that we read and learn, these situations still exist and surely it won’t be long before novels are written for and about the children who suffered in the Cambodian killing fields, or the Rwanda genocide, or the Bosnian war. This is as it should be. For they are the ones who didn’t live to tell their stories themselves.

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