Trigger warnings for domestic violence and child abuse.
Gretel Fernsby has a secret, one that she’s been keeping for most of her long life. it torments her. She knows that, if it were to get out, the secret has the potential to ruin her life and her son’s life. In All the Broken Places, John Boyne’s sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, we find Gretel at the age of 91, still guarding her secret. When a new family moves into the flat below hers, Gretel is pushed to act at the risk of her ability to hide her parentage and her father’s crimes from the world.
Readers who’ve read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas will already know what Gretel’s secret is. If you haven’t, it doesn’t take long for Gretel to reveal in chapters that flashback to 1946, in Paris, and the early 1950s, in Sydney, Australia, that she is the daughter of one of the commandants of Auschwitz. Before her brother disappeared into the camp, Gretel was a true believer. She wore the uniform of a Nazi girl’s group and never questioned what her father or the lieutenant were doing in Auschwitz. After the war, Gretel struggles to come to terms with her own part in the Nazi death machine. Yes, she was a child, but is she culpable for her father’s crimes? I don’t know that Gretel finds peace so much as she finds a way to compartmentalize away all of the things she can’t resolve.
In the present, Gretel is a wealthy woman (thanks to her now-deceased historian husband). She lives in a posh flat in a very desirable part of London. (Her son pesters her to sell up so that he can have the money.) Gretel doesn’t want to leave. She also doesn’t want anything to change, so the arrival of a new family in the downstairs flat troubles her. She grows even more troubled when she learns that the wife and son are terrorized by an abusive, controlling, monstrous husband. Being on the periphery of terrible acts—involved but not involved—mirrors the position Gretel was in when she was younger. She might have a chance, this time, to do something right.
I continue to be fascinated by books that show how people (fictional or otherwise) wrestle with their consciences in the face of what is right and what is possible. A lot of us believe that we would resist or actively fight oppression, systemic crimes, and so on. We certainly like to think so. Fiction like All the Broken Places pushes us to really think about what we might do if we were in Gretel’s position in a more realistic way. Could we really stand up to parents we idealize? What could we do against the full force of the Nazi regime? Also, these stories pose questions about how we live with ourselves when we fail to do what is right (even if doing what’s right is impossible). How do people withstand an ocean of guilt, regret, and self-recrimination? Would we hide our secrets like Gretel? Would we try to atone?
Readers who enjoy impossible ethical dilemmas will love All the Broken Places.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.