<P> The next day Bruno concocts a plan with Shmuel to sneak into the camp to look for Shmuel's father . Shmuel brings a set of prison clothes (which look to Bruno like striped pyjamas), and Bruno leaves his own clothes outside the fence . As they search the camp, both children are rounded up along with a group of prisoners on a "march". They are forced to remove their clothing and are led into a gas chamber . In the gas chamber, Bruno apologizes to Shmuel for not finding his father and tells Shmuel that he is Bruno's best friend for life . It's unknown if Shmuel answers him, because as soon as the door is closed, the lights go out and all is chaos . However, Bruno is determined that even in chaos, he will never let go of Shmuel's hand . </P> <P> Kathryn Hughes, writing in The Guardian, calls the novel "a small wonder of a book". While she comments on "the oddness of Auschwitz security being so lax that a child prisoner could make a weekly date with the commandant's son without anyone noticing", she describes the novel as "something that borders on fable", arguing that "Bruno's innocence comes to stand for the willful refusal of all adult Germans to see what was going on under their noses". </P> <P> Nicholas Tucker, writing in The Independent, calls the novel "a fine addition to a once taboo area of history, at least where children's literature is concerned . It provides an account of a dreadful episode short on actual horror but packed with overtones that remain in the imagination . Plainly and sometimes archly written, it stays just ahead of its readers before delivering its killer punch in the final pages ." </P> <P> Ed Wright, writing in The Age of Melbourne, calls the novel "a touching tale of an odd friendship between two boys in horrendous circumstances and a reminder of man's capacity for inhumanity". He felt that "Bruno's friendship with Shmuel is rendered with neat awareness of the paradoxes between children's naïve egocentricity, their innate concept of fairness, familial loyalty and obliviousness to the social conventions of discrimination". He concludes by observing that "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is subtitled A Fable and, as in other modern fables such as Antoine de St. - Exupéry's The Little Prince, Boyne uses Bruno to reveal the flaws in an adult world". </P>

How many chapters in the boy in the striped pajamas