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

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John Boyne will seat us right next to Gretel as she shuffles the scenery of her youth in Berlin during World War II. She's twelve years old and the family has moved to Auschwitz in Poland where her father is a commandant of one of the Reich's most notorious extermination camps. The family maintains their home right on the other side of the camp. Family life ignores the element of horror and tragedy only so many feet away. 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. My Mayfair residence is listed as a flat but that is a little like describing Windsor Castle as the Queen’s weekend bolthole.” All The Broken Places” is a sequel of sorts to his 2006 novel, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, which was also made into a movie. One does not need to read the first one to appreciate this complex story.

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.How does Gretel as a mother compare to her own mother? What similarities do you notice? What differences? How do you think Gretel’s feelings toward her own parents affected her ability to be a parent herself? Making art about the Holocaust is morally fraught, as the artist has an obligation both to memorialise and to teach. That is what the subject demands, if you want to be seemly. If you want to be unseemly, please yourself. If you really want to know about boys in Auschwitz, there are two memoirs: If This Is a Man by Primo Levi and Night by Elie Wiesel. But immutable truth is hard. You might not want it on your bedside table. So, instead, there’s a tendency to vagary and whimsy; to mythology and to distance; to being unable to conceal your greater interest in Nazis than your interest in their victims (and Boyne cannot); to reading Anne Frank’s diary, a book about the Holocaust that omits the Holocaust; to this. John Boyne does a great job in not connecting the dots. He lets readers contemplate their own conclusions: I respect him for it…..

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. 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. 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”. 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.)

Gretel’s approach of complacent complicity serves her well until a ghost from her past brings a forced, guilty admission of how, even as a 12-year-old, she bought into the privilege and attention brought by her father’s high Nazi rank. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. His expression was one that I had seen before, when I was a child and living in that other place. The soldiers had worn it, almost to a man. A desire to hurt. An awareness that there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. It was mesmerizing. I could not look away and nor, it seemed, could he.” With that, Boyne has taken us into the heart of his other main activity in the recent past: being someone who, depending on your perspective, either attracts – or courts – controversy.

Given his own success, could he help champion these young writers? With a sigh, it becomes clear he believes he has tried.Gretel's story as a teenager runs parallel to her life as a 91-year-old woman living in an apartment in modern-day Mayfair, London. She is a widower and has a son who visits occasionally, and is friends with a neighbor called Heidi who is suffering from early onset dementia. She likes to keep herself to herself. But then a small boy called Henry and his parents move into the downstairs flat and it triggers memories and emotions that Gretel would prefer to stay dormant. But does it also offer her the opportunity for some redemption? I had mixed feelings (resistance to be honest) about reading “All The Broken Places”…. another ‘fiction’ story associated with The Holocaust….