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

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John Boyne is a master storyteller and he never ceases to amaze me with his novels. Great characters and beautifully written. An emotional story told with perfection. In 1946, German born Gretel, and her mother escaped Poland for Paris, after a monumental event took place in their personal lives. Physically they may have fled their past, but psychologically, the shame and accompanying fear meant they would never really find peace. Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organisation housed at University College London, found that 35 per cent of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85 per cent of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.

My curtains twitched whenever the estate agent pulled up outside, escorting a client in to inspect the flat, and I made notes about each potential neighbour. There was a very promising husband and wife in their early seventies, softly spoken, who held each other’s hands and asked whether pets were permitted in the building– I was listening on the stairwell– and seemed disappointed when told they were not. A homosexual couple in their thirties who, judging by the distressed condition of their clothing and their general unkempt air, must have been fabulously wealthy, but who declared that the ‘space’ was probably a little small for them and they couldn’t relate to its ‘narrative’. A young woman with plain features who gave no clue as to her intentions, other than to remark that someone named Steven would adore the high ceilings. Naturally, I hoped for the gays– they make good neighbours and there’s little chance of them procreating– but they proved to be the least interested. Gretel Fernsby will prove to be one of the most complicated characters in recent times. We'll meet her at the age of ninety-one living in the upscale section of Mayfair in London. She's been a widow for some time after the passing of her husband Edgar. But her son, Caden, wishes for his mother to sell her flat. After all, he's on his fourth marriage and could use the cash. Gretel refuses to even consider selling. Devlin, Martina (2022-09-22). "All The Broken Places by John Boyne: A sister's lifetime in the shadow of the death camps". Irish Independent . Retrieved 2023-01-09. Boyne writes a very complex character in Gretel. Like all humans, she has made huge mistakes, has many regrets. But she’s been kind, thoughtful, and good as well. She’s ashamed and has spent her whole life denying that she had any responsibility in her father’s life work, even when she knew it was wrong. A powerful novel about secrets and atonement after Auschwitz… All the Broken Places is a defence of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature; and it does so with a novelist’s skill, precision and power.”

READERS GUIDE

I still think ‘Boy/Pyjamas’ is a good story, as long as one reads it as exactly that, a story of fiction. If every man is guilty of all the good he did not do, as Voltaire suggested, then I have spent a lifetime convincing myself that I am innocent of all the bad. It has been a convenient way to endure decades of self-imposed exile from the past, to see myself as a victim of historical amnesia, acquitted from complicity, and exonerated from blame. I was privileged ton read an advance copy of this novel, the sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas . Boyne uses Gretel to illuminate complicity in knowing something is wrong, terrible, and not doing anything about it, not taking any responsibility. In Gretel’s case, if she, at age 12, went to the authorities and reported what she had seen, could she have saved lives? Instead, she spent her life hiding and ashamed. At age 91, nearly 92, she must confront her culpability. Shall she turn a blind eye? Or, should she do something to help save the mother and boy, which could result in her being identified and humiliated? When is a monster's child culpable? Guilt and complicity are multifaceted. John Boyne is a maestro of historical fiction. You can't prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel." - John Irving, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The World According to Garp

It’s very much a story about grief and guilt. About trauma, and attempting to escape the past. About running, but never being able to hide. But it's also a compassionate book, and Gretel is a deeply flawed but likeable character and we can see how she has been shaped by events. Gripping and well honed...Consumately constructed, humming with tension...A defence of literature's need to shine a light on the darkest aspets of human nature and it does so with a noveli's skill, precision and power The Guardian John Boyne does a great job in not connecting the dots. He lets readers contemplate their own conclusions: I respect him for it…..Unlike Striped Pyjamas, All the Broken Places is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language – and also some details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm”.

With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study. This is a fiction story and I am always aware when reading historical fiction stories that I may not get an extensive or satisfying portrayal of events in the past but that is fine as I have read a vast amount of non fiction books on the War and that is where I get my facts and information from. The sequel has Boyne’s skill and immorality: but this time, less of the first, and more of the second. It has, in parts, the tone of a serious, literary novel and a calm and self-aware narrator in Gretel, a woman with all Boyne’s careful words at her disposal, living in a sumptuous flat in Mayfair, of all places. Gretel is Bruno’s older sister, now in her 90s, ruminating on a lifetime of concealment and tidal guilt. When Gretel witnesses a violent argument between Henry’s mother and his domineering father, she is faced with a chance to make amends for her guilt, grief and remorse and act to save a young boy. But by doing this she would be forced to reveal her true identity to the world and could cost her dearly. During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”As to this first goal, at least, it is a consummate failure, a wildly simplified narrative that misrepresents the extent of Nazi ideology. As in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Boyne underestimates the family’s awareness of the Holocaust, lending his German characters an exaggerated naivety, or implausible deniability. To take one ridiculous example, how on Earth would a girl active in the Jungmädelbund (a girls’ section of the Hitler Youth), nursed on anti-Semitic propaganda, not notice that a guy named David Rotheram, who presumably speaks with a Yiddish accent, is Jewish? And while Boyne mechanically asserts that the past is “complicated”, he betrays no knowledge of those complications. He portrays Nazi officials as swiftly killed, omitting that hundreds of them held high-ranking positions in the post-war West German government. Simultaneously, he portrays their families as unscathed (save a head-shave), omitting that in the Russian zone – the only one tending to summary executions of Nazis – women were frequently raped by the occupiers. Boyne flaunts a teenager’s understanding of the causes and consequences of the Second World War: Germans were poor, then naughty, then poor again. Indeed, he at no point even alludes to any present-day legacy of Nazism: not the rise of the right-wing nationalist Alternative für Deutschland, not synagogue terrorism in Europe or America, not even, at any point, the mere concept of Holocaust denial. Instead, this sterile novel stays well confined within a London apartment building, unaware of and uninterested in the world outside. For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him. 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?