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

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Only in the last years have grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators begun to break the silence on their family history in a way their parents could not. Leading the way is Alexandra Senfft – a close friend of this reporter’s – whose grandfather Hanns Ludin was Nazi governor in occupied Slovakia. Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the 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.”

Groupthink was the basis of the Nazi regime; indoctrination gave it its power,” he writes. “In a civilised society - and, for that matter, in publishing - the freedom to express one’s opinions without being vilified or threatened with erasure must be upheld.” What a brilliant story it was and it needed telling, probably movie worthy just like the boy in stripped Pj's. 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? 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.”In hindsight, the dispute was a taster of what drives so many of today’s culture wars, which journalist and author Jon Ronson describes as “those things we shout at each other about online”. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”

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. All the Broken Places jumps between the past, in which Gretel and her mother escape from Nazi Germany and attempt to rebuild their lives in a world with very good reason to hate them, and the present, in which ninety-one-year-old Gretel finds herself once again a witness to the suffering of innocents. She can't change the past, of course, but can she make a difference now? Mine is simply a novel that could be used in an ancilliary way. No part of me has ever suggested that if you want to understand the Holocaust then this (book) is how,” he said. Gretel Fernsby is in her nineties, but she’s bright as a button and sharp as a knife - she has to be, because Gretel has a secret, a secret that she’s carried with her for most of her life, one she’s determined to keep to herself.Boyne’s Gretel represents entire generations of Germans. Despite far-reaching efforts to come to terms with their terrible past in the post-war decades, Germans’ embrace of self-interested silence remains the rule rather than the exception. Gretel’s smart, engaging and uncompromising voice draws the reader in deftly – at the beginning she feels like a cosy crime heroine, or the deliciously spiky narrator found in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. She spies on her wealthy new neighbours: a film producer, his wife and their small son, Henry. But it doesn’t stay cosy for long. Gretel and the film producer are both hiding very dark secrets indeed. The two circle each other warily, as Gretel considers how much she is prepared to do to save someone’s life without compromising her own safety. We see Gretel as a child in Germany, a teen in France, a young woman in Australia, and through many decades of life in London. What changes did you notice in Gretel’s personality throughout the years? 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. 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.