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

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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. 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.

That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of Striped Pyjamas, which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the nine-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pyjamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.” In his 1998 essay “Who Owns Auschwitz?” the survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész grappled with the problem of how to represent the Holocaust in literature and film. The paradox he expressed was that “for the Holocaust to become with time a real part of European (or at least western European) public consciousness, the price inevitably extracted in exchange for public notoriety had to be paid”. That price was the Shoah’s “stylisation”: its transformation into either “cheap consumer goods” or “a moral-political ritual, complete with a new and often phony language”. In both cases, he argued, the Holocaust gradually becomes the realm not of reality, not of history, not of jaw-dropping, thought-defying tragedy, but of kitsch. Gretel, Bruno’s grieving, guilt-ridden sister, is the narrator. The reader gradually pieces together her story as the narrative switches confidently from present-day Mayfair, where for decades she has been living in a comfortable flat, to her peripatetic past. As she tries to escape the chaos of the end of the second world war, she grapples with her memories of Auschwitz, her parents and her own part in her brother’s death. These are vividly detailed, with a sense of revenge and retribution always lurking around the corner. 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.”

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I still think ‘Boy/Pyjamas’ is a good story, as long as one reads it as exactly that, a story of fiction. He would read many more Holocaust books during his 20s, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?” I don’t doubt there is a valuable novel to be written about Nazi children, but Boyne does not choose this path. He lingers for a while, but then transforms his novel, instead, into what feels like a police procedural: a thriller. Boyne does a deep dive into this deeply flawed character. How one can never escape the past; How events shape who we are; How we remain broken until we can reconcile the past with the present; how we can still change who we are from who we were. Even decades later. 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”.

She loves her son, but she has all the advantages of a wonderful location plus only a few neighbours.

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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. Her mother was a popular beauty until she became an alcoholic, and Gretel later enjoyed her own privilege of the power people confer on a pretty young woman. She could ask questions and flirt her way through any answers she didn’t want to give. I believe everyone has their own line in the sand, the point beyond which they either won’t go or would be uncomfortable going. As we become more experienced and learn more, we may shift that line from ‘won’t’ to ‘uncomfortable’, depending on pressure and circumstances. This follow up however… it feels like an attempt to justify all the criticism ‘Boy/Pyjamas’ received. An ill-conceived judgment by the author, and probably publisher alike. Should’ve just left well alone, frankly.

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.Gretel is a wonderfully complex character, and John Boyne does an incredible job of challenging us to like or dislike Gretel. She is a woman who can show incredible generosity yet show dislikeable traits. Gretel rises to action driven by concern yet can deliver harsh reactions. The remarkable aspect of Gretel’s story is deciding how culpable she was at fifteen to the inhumane compassionless environment of Auschwitz and the gnawing guilt that has been her constant companion for eighty years. “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.” If she was innocent, why was she living under an assumed name? Why had she kept her past hidden from everyone, including her son? I have to admit, I wasn’t a fan of the and yet the characters stayed with me after all these years, and while I didn’t love it, I was very eager to read the sequel and see what became of these characters. In All the Broken Places we meet Gretel again. The book is told in two timelines, one after Gretel and her mother have escaped after the war and gone undercover so as avoid possible arrest for war crimes, and the other of Gretel in her nineties living in comfort in London but still hiding under another name and still full of guilt. 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.