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

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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!

This is a very different story, one that definitely feels pitched toward an older audience – no real surprise given Gretel’s advanced years, but the tone is definitely more grown up, more earthy. It’s a convoluted but easy to follow tale full of echoes from the past and yet with plenty of intrigue wrapped up in the present day element too. Boyne is a brilliant storyteller and here he manages to spin a yarn that grabbed me on an emotional level whilst also teasing me predict what might be an acceptable outcome to a challenging current conundrum. From the New York Times bestselling author John Boyne, a devastating, beautiful story about a woman who must confront the sins of her own terrible past, and a present in which it is never too late for bravery. At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with All the Broken Places alluding to criticisms of Striped Pyjamas. 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. 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.

The Devil’s Daughter

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. If the point is that this could happen to anyone, it is very obliquely made. There are serious objections to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. A child like Bruno would know what Nazism is, and would be schooled to hate Jews. A child like Shmuel would not be at liberty to walk the fence, and his anger is so muted it is nonexistent. He is not yet dead, and already he is silenced. David never knows about the daughter he conceived with Gretel. What do you think of Gretel’s decision not to tell him about her pregnancy? This novel, this exceptional, layered and compelling story,is built on modernhistory and all of us people who live it. The protagonist, the elderly, forthright and mysteriousMrs. Fernsby,is more thanmemorable andevery one of Boyne’scharacters,andevery scene,darkor light,is limnedin truth and insight. Thisbookmoves likea freight train,with force and consequence for the reader.” 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.

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? 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. Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.” 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. Boyne has defended The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by pointing to its subtitle, “A Fable”, and his efforts to educate children that the book is a novel. Fiction should not bear the burden of education, he argues. Nonetheless, a survey by the London Jewish Cultural Centre found that 75 per cent of respondents thought that it had been based on a true story.Kertész bemoaned the way Holocaust art devolves into the dutiful repetition of “certain words”. What are they? Boyne suggests a few contenders. How many times does All the Broken Places refer to the “truth”? Forty-two. Guilt? Thirty-six. Past? Thirty-four. Trauma, horror, and monster get ten uses each. The dialogue is leaden and expository: “My daddy’s not a monster”; “It doesn’t matter any more. It’s all in the past.” The narration is bloated and risible: “He was gone. Louis was gone. Millions were gone”; “I had witnessed too much suffering in my life and done nothing to help. I had to intervene.” The story is told from the point of view of 92 year old Gretel who has lived her life hiding her dark and disturbing past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Germany or her post war years in France. She keeps the fact that she is the daughter of one of the commandant leaders in a notorious Nazi Concentration Camp well hidden and lives a quiet life in her apartment until a young family moves into the apartment below her and Gretel forms a new friendship with Henry their young son. Sequel to the hugely successful The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, All The Broken Places is a moving story about grief, guilt and complicity. Needless to say, that with John Boyne at the helm, we’re treated to a storyline full of insight, from the ugliness of life through to the purity of love. Don’t miss this one! 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.' The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas