In nearly every stage of her life, Gretel keeps her past a secret—both out of shame and out of fear for her own safety. If you were able to speak with Gretel at any point in her life, what would you say to her about her choice to stay silent? What would you say to her after she finally comes forward with the truth?

In 2012, I was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for my body of work. I’ve also won 4 Irish Book Awards, and many international literary awards, including the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia. Like a lot of people, I read ‘The Boy in Stripped Pyjamas’, getting on for 20 yrs ago now, and was heartbroken at the time. However, having read more about the responses to it over the years, not least from The Holocaust Learning Centre, much of the criticism is deserved, in my opinion. Almost eighty years after the second world war, Gretel Fernsby (sister to Bruno) lives in an exclusive apartment in Mayfair, London. New neighbours are moving in, and Gretel, as always, worries about anyone discovering her past and the family connection to the horror capital of the world – Auschwitz. Her father was a commandant there, and at the end of the war, she and her mother fled Poland to France and the life of cover-up, disguise, and constant moving in Europe and Australia began.

All the Broken Places

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. 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’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.

John Boyne is one of my favourite authors but strangely enough the I was one of the very few people who wasn’t completely blown away by his novel ‘The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas’. I did enjoy it but not as much as the wonderful ‘The Hearts invisible Furies’ or ‘Ladder to the Sky’ which were both masterpieces. ‘All the Broken Places’ is a sequel to ‘The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas’ and I was completely absorbed from the very start. 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. I have had quite a degree of difficulty trying to rate and review this book. I notice that many people are rating it five stars but I cannot do that because it would put it on the same standing as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and to me at least it is certainly not that good. 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? Will her secret stay a secret, or will she chose to help a little boy is the issue she faces with the knowledge it could blow her world apart?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. I told myself that none of it had been my fault, that I had been just a child, but there was that small part of my brain that asked me, if I was entirely innocent, then why was I living under an assumed name?” When Gretel witnesses a violent argument between Henry’s mother and his domineering father, she is faced with a chance to make amends for her guilt, grief and remorse and act to save a young boy. But by doing this she would be forced to reveal her true identity to the world and could cost her dearly. Boyne introduces us to Gretel at ninety-one, living in a very comfortable flat in Mayfair, London, which her son, Caden, is anxious to sell (to tap into his inheritance) and move his mother into a nice retirement village. Gretel loves her home.

The exchange was provoked after Boyne criticised what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.” I was born in Dublin, Ireland, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by UEA. Boyne’s style continues to be hypnotic and sharp. He delivers a Holocaust story with brutal precision and bold prose. 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 licence. 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.” Boyne's latest novel, "All the Broken Places," is not so much a follow-up as a spinoff, and one that is aimed squarely at adults. Its narrator is 91-year-old widow Gretel Fernsby. "You're a dark horse," someone tells her. "Darker than most," is her reply. For Gretel is Bruno's sister. Haunted by his death and scarred by her father's war crimes, she has lived a life of grief and guilt, spending large parts of it on the move and under assumed names.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. Gretel is a 91 year old widow living in comfort in a small London apartment building. The only complications in her life are her son, who marries too frequently, and her neighbor and friend who is developing dementia. Then a film producer, his attractive wife and young son Henry move in. When it become apparent that the wife and son have good reason to fear the producer, Gretel has to decide how much she is willing to risk to help them. Gretel is not her real name and no one, including her son, knows the true story of her past. Since she and her mother fled Nazi Germany she has lived with her fear that people will learn that her father was the commandant of a concentration camp. She has also lived with the guilt of her complicity in the Nazi horrors. 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. 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 He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.

Boyne was successful in getting me to think about the complexity of Gretel's knowledge and guilt, how she dealt with these and the various ways in which they affected her life. The story was so compelling at times that I listened to all 8 hours of the audiobook in one day. However (and this is a big however) Boyne has Gretel behave in ways that are so preposterous and contrived that I often found myself grimacing with distaste and disbelief. Painful groans of "Oh, come on!" flew from my mouth more than once. Also, Boyne infuses Gretel's character with a great deal of nuance so she feels like a real person (despite her younger and older selves having different personalities). But the other characters in this novel are for the most part one dimensional. For all the mistakes in her life, for all her complicity in evil, and for all her regrets, I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling,” Boyne writes in an author’s note. “It is up to the reader to decide whether it is worth reading.” For this reader, alas, the answer is no. Whether our sympathies lie with Gretel’s first-person account is moot because the characters are too thinly drawn to evoke emotion either way. Other shortcomings include clunky plot devices, implausible dialogue, an unnecessary twist and a preposterous ending. The problem with All the Broken Places is less whether Gretel’s story is worth telling than how it’s told. 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.

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.” Kitsch has indeed come to dominate the field – from the Broadway adaptation of the Diary of Anne Frank to Schindler’s List. At the other end of the spectrum, masterpieces, often by survivors – Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Jean Améry – tend towards aesthetic and intellectual rigour, resisting closure and withholding comfort. Much of so-called “Holocaust fiction” is aimed at children and included in the “Holocaust curricula” that are mandatory in many jurisdictions, though fatally handicapped by a refusal to show children violence or even darkness. In the years since Kertész’s essay, however, a micro-genre of Holocaust fiction for adults has proliferated: The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz, The Violinist of Auschwitz. Unlike the children’s fare, these have no excuse for their optimism.