When my girls were both in middle school, they read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. Instinctively, I knew this would be a difficult book, so I read it also. Along with Night by Elie Wiesel, this is one of the most impactful novels about WWII and the Holocaust that I have read.
All the Broken Places is the story of Gretel, the daughter from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. (Quick review for those that haven't read it. Gretel's father is an important commander in the Third Reich, and he is assigned to oversee a concentration camp. He moves his wife, 12-year-old Gretel and 8-year-old Bruno to a house close to the camp. Bruno becomes friends with a boy over the fence who wears striped pajamas. The story ends with Bruno's death.)
After Germany is defeated, Gretel's father is hung, and friends ("true believers") help Gretel and her mother flee to Paris. They settle in a small French town until her mother dies. Then, Gretel moves to Australia hoping to start a new life there. In Australia, she recognizes her father's old assistant - Kurt - who now presents himself as an anti-Nazi activist and family man. After several encounters with Kurt, she once again flees to England, where she finds good employment and tries to put the past behind her.
The story alternates between Gretel's Post-War years and the current day where she is a 91-year-old widow living out her days quietly in her expensive Hyde Park apartment. Her quiet days end when a new family with an 8-year-old boy moves into the apartment below hers and she becomes involved in their lives.
All the Broken Places is a story about guilt and punishment. Gretel is a complicated character. She was brainwashed by her father and her country's leaders. As she understands the war's cost to the rest of the world, she begins to feel the guilt of her inaction and ashamed of her father. But those feelings are combined with a true love for her father and what she considered a wonderful childhood (until they moved to Poland which really, she just regrets missing her friends and Berlin). There is a particular hard scene with Kurt in a cafe where you see she can still be awed by Hitler. It takes hurting (even disgusting) someone she loves in England before she fully accepts her personal responsibility in the Holocaust. But in that same moment, she experiences the grace of Edgar, whom she marries.
Gretel punishes herself by being a disengaged mother and generally disengaged with life. She keeps to herself until the new family moves in. Now more mature and reflecting more on her life experiences, she wants to save her young neighbor who reminds her so much of the brother she lost. As she tries to atone for her own sins by standing up for the boy and his mother, she finds the opportunity for the actual punishment she deserves as a collaborator of the Third Reich.
Boyne's imagination of the complicated life of Gretel, after growing up in the Nazi era and under a true believer of Hitler's vision for Germany, strikes me as realistic. Although it is something I can't even imagine.
I highly recommend All the Broken Places. Having read a lot of WWII novels, this one is different because it deals with the repercussions of the war on individuals and families.
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