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

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John Boyne’s shameless sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas exemplifies a genre that expunges the genocide of its horror, and its Jewishness. John Boyne studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He is now the author of 21 books. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill John Boyne himself says 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....I have less interest in the monsters than I do in the people who knew what the monsters were doing and deliberately looked away.” John Boyne

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. Under an assumed name, Gretel tries to reinvent herself, but is haunted by her past wherever she goes. We witness her being violently humiliated in France and fatefully crossing paths with a childhood love interest – a Nazi soldier – in Australia, causing her to flee to London. Before she starts dating the man who becomes her husband, she dates his Jewish friend, who lost his family in Treblinka. When she confesses her identity, he tells her to burn in hell and takes off to America. Gretel has a breakdown when her son is nine, the age at which her brother died. She spends a year in a psychiatric ward without confessing the source of her trauma to a doctor. And what is this novel? He sees it as a formulaic university novel of “self-involved students who think they are the first people in the world ever to have sex” and in which the authors, “terrified of offending anyone make sure they hit, in each book, all the right things: gay people, trans people, people of colour”. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our She loves her son, but she has all the advantages of a wonderful location plus only a few neighbours.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. I personally didn’t think the book was historically accurate-and it was my least favorite book by John Boyne…..

We first met Gretel when she was 12 years old in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, living "on the other side of the fence" at "Out-with" (Auschwitz). In All the Broken Places Boyne imagines the life she might have led after the war and how she would have dealt with her sense of guilt about what she witnessed of her beloved father’s role as the commandant of one of the Third Reich's most notorious death camps. More specifically, we learn about the contradictions in Gretel's mind about what she saw and what she did and didn't do. "I didn't know" . We follow her from girlhood to the age of 92, as she moves from Poland to post-war France, then 1950s Australia and finally Britain. 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. Tapping into the issue of Nazi perpetrator families and their suffering in the post-war years is likely to be as controversial as the debate over The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has been. I do have to say that I found the conclusion overly dramatic, but I can’t deny that this author is very talented.i love so many of JBs other books and they will always hold a very dear place in my heart. but, when it comes to this particular situation/story, JB is showing his true colours as a person and im not sure i personally like the look. They feel unfairly guilty as they didn’t commit any crimes themselves but feel swept up with those who committed crimes,” says Boyne, during our Zoom call. “Gretel’s whole life has been tarnished by the actions of someone else: she feels she can’t excuse herself, but also feels ‘I have nothing to excuse myself for’.” 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? Boyne delivers a seemingly redundant adult sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas...Boyne creates vivid characters, but a certain thematic obviousness dilutes the dramatic effect. Fans of the first book may enjoy revisiting the material as adults, but this doesn't quite land on its own." - Publishers Weekly

Gain access to exclusive content shared only with the ToI Community, including exclusive webinars with our reporters and weekly letters from founding editor David Horovitz. One of John Boyne’s most popular and intensely moving stories was The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and he has taken the step after many years to write the sequel, All the Broken Places. It must have weighed on his mind if he could maintain the legacy of such an admired and deeply profound story. Holocaust stories, especially fiction, are responsible for paying respect to the emotionality of characters and delicately navigating a tale that never reduces the impact of the horrendous crimes committed. Firstly I would like to thank netgalley, Random House publisher,And the wonderful author John Boyne. Gretel is an interesting proposition for the reader. You have to ask yourself how complicit she was while living in Auschwitz. How much did she know, and how much is she telling us? I think that will affect your opinion of the book - I felt that she was young when it happened, though she could have come forward to the authorities earlier. But she's kind and thoughtful and at times has tried to do good in her life. She's also funny and strong-willed, but complicated. Very human, in other words.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.

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 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? 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.” Gretel watches the troubling relationship between vulnerable, nine-year-old Henry – the same age as her brother Bruno when he died – and his aggressive father Alex Darcy-Witt. As the father becomes more abusive, Gretel decides that she must act. That’s why we started the Times of Israel eleven years ago - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.