All The Broken Places: The Sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

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I personally didn’t think the book was historically accurate-and it was my least favorite book by John Boyne…..

While the Nazi regime was steered by a relatively small number of true believers, officials and soldiers, enough low-level complacency from enough people, she points out, is what really kept the Nazi machinery moving. In her work, Alexandra’s maxim has always been clear: confronting the demons of the past does not exor#e them, but can neutralise their hold on descendants. A scene from the 2008 film adaptation of John Boyne's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas: He has tied the narrative threads he left dangling in that book with his latest release, All the Broken Places, the story of Bruno’s older sister Gretel. Now a widow in her 90s, Gretel is living in London’s Mayfair, nursing a small fortune and the poisonous secret of her death camp father.

Kurt asks Gretel, “Why do you struggle to call things what they are?” (251) She refuses to say her brother’s name or the name of her former residence in Germany. How do you think this affects the way Gretel processes her emotions? Can you relate? We don’t need anyone to teach us how to recognise the barefaced devil; the danger is the insidious and gradual creep of violence into the civilised and everyday. This is what the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s dictum – “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – warned of: art unable to recognise the break the Holocaust represented with the past, afraid to apprehend the failure of the civilising project. With this childish drivel in which the villains and victims come labelled and sorted, Boyne yet again seems immune to its lessons. In 2012, I was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for my body of work. I’ve also won 4 Irish Book Awards, and many international literary awards, including the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia. Boyne’s style continues to be hypnotic and sharp. He delivers a Holocaust story with brutal precision and bold prose.

Gretel insists to Kurt that she doesn’t wish the Allies had lost the war, despite the personal advantages she would have gained. Kurt doesn’t believe her: “You’re lying. . . . You are. I can see it in your face. You need to tell yourself that you wouldn’t so you can feel a sense of moral superiority, but I don’t believe you for even a moment” (253). Do you believe Gretel? Later, when Alex Darcy-Witt suggests that Gretel wishes Germany had won the war, she responds, “No one wins a war” (355). Why do you think she answers differently this time? This book is a companion to the “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”. The books share characters and events, but this can be read as a standalone. In this book, we encounter Gretel in four places, in each of which a dramatic, gut wrenching event occurs - Germany/Poland during the war, France where Gretel and her mother tried to make new lives, Australia where Gretel’s attempt to run from her history failed again and London where she found love. I found this book interesting but it did not get under my skin as the first book did. It probably did not help that I am becoming increasingly tired of the alternate chapter/timeline set up. I long for an historical fiction book which begins at the beginning and progresses through to the end in one continuous line!While over a third of English secondary schools use The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and its film adaptation in Holocaust lessons, Auschwitz Memorial replied that the book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the Holocaust”. The tweet linked to a 2019 essay in which Hannah May Randall, the head of learning at Holocaust Centre North, highlights the novel’s historical inaccuracies and faults it for perpetuating “dangerous myths”. Gretel is a 91 year old widow living in comfort in a small London apartment building. The only complications in her life are her son, who marries too frequently, and her neighbor and friend who is developing dementia. Then a film producer, his attractive wife and young son Henry move in. When it become apparent that the wife and son have good reason to fear the producer, Gretel has to decide how much she is willing to risk to help them. Gretel is not her real name and no one, including her son, knows the true story of her past. Since she and her mother fled Nazi Germany she has lived with her fear that people will learn that her father was the commandant of a concentration camp. She has also lived with the guilt of her complicity in the Nazi horrors. But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)

In his author’s note, John Boyne states that “All the Broken Places” “is a novel about guilt, complicity, and grief, a book that sets out to examine how culpable a young person might be, given the historical events unfolding around her, and whether such a person can ever cleanse themselves of the crimes committed by the people she loved.” He also stated that “I have less interest in the monsters than I do in the people who knew what the monsters were doing and deliberately looked away.”Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” Boyne writes in his author’s note. “Not the burden of education, which is the task of non-fiction, but the burden of exploring emotional truths and authentic human experiences while remembering that the story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling.” Mia Levitin The author asks the question: What would you have done in twelve-year-old Gretel's shoes? Would you have alerted the authorities once the war was over? Did she turn a blind eye and pretend it wasn't happening? And with the death of her brother, did she pay a high enough price? When someone makes a mistake early in her young life, is she doomed for the rest of her days - can she be forgiven?

She loves her son, but she has all the advantages of a wonderful location plus only a few neighbours. This is the valuable part of the novel: in Paris, in hiding, Gretel and her mother, an unrepentant Nazi, are shaved at a kangaroo court; she is attracted to violent sex with men who hate her because she is German; in Australia, she meets the psychopath she loved as a child, her father’s assistant, and they discuss their complicity; she becomes pregnant by a Jewish man. Gretel Fernsby has led a turbulent life. She is ninety-one and was at the age of twelve raised in a place she does no mention. It was a place of death and destruction trying to eradicate a race by a so called master plan. She is the daughter of the head of this place and is exposed to its horrors, but chooses to turn a blind eye. She is only twelve and what can a twelve year old do? After the death of someone close to her and eventually she and mother's escape to Paris for a time, Gretel, assumes a number of identities, always secretive, never allowing anyone except eventually her husband to know the terrible secret she carries. I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.” Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

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Groupthink was the basis of the Nazi regime; indoctrination gave it its power,” he writes. “In a civilised society - and, for that matter, in publishing - the freedom to express one’s opinions without being vilified or threatened with erasure must be upheld.” When Gretel and Kurt meet in Australia and talk about their lives since the war, Kurt says, “I don’t remember making any conscious decisions about my life. It was all laid out for me so young” (250). What do you think of that statement? When do young people gain a responsibility for their own lives?