All the Broken Places

Gretel plans to confront Alex, but Madelyn answers the door. She feels better; per Alex’s suggestion, she might get a pill organizer so she doesn’t overdose again. Alex also says that Madelyn talks too much and doesn’t think before she speaks.

Henry appears wearing a t-shirt with a graphic of the cover of Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). He also has a black eye. Madelyn says it’s from sleepwalking, and she orders Henry to go to his room, but he stays and talks to Gretel about Verne.

After Madelyn screams at Henry to go to his room, he obeys. Madelyn says Henry is disobedient, and Alex insists on strict discipline. Gretel asks Madelyn if Alex scares her, and she notes that Henry and Madelyn have many injuries. Madelyn claims she’s fine, and Henry is fine. He’ll go back to school once his eye is less swollen. When Alex comes home, he and Gretel go to talk in the garden.

Before Gretel tells David her story, David corrects what Edgar told her about him. David didn’t tell Edgar the truth. David’s sister, Dita, was an exquisite pianist, and her parents kept her in former Czechoslovakia so she could play a career-making recital. His grandparents tried to dissuade his parents, but they couldn’t, and Nazis gassed his mother, father, and sister in Treblinka. David has nightmares about being naked in the gas chambers with them. He thinks he should become a Nazi hunter and find the Nazis hiding in South America, Europe, Australia, and so on.

Gretel starts telling David her story. He assumes that she’s going to tell him that her father was a soldier who fought for Nazi Germany. Gretel says that’s partly true, and David doesn’t blame Gretel, but then Gretel tells David more.

In the garden, Alex tells Gretel that the police visited him in his Soho office. They came without warning, and Alex compares them to SS officers. One of the officers was Jewish, which he says might bother Gretel, but it doesn’t bother him. Gretel quips that Alex saves his hate for women and tiny boys.

Alex says he’s “starstruck” by Gretel. He had researchers look into Gretel on the computer. When one got stuck, he enlisted another—no one knows the full details besides him. With help from the Darkness documentary, he put the story together. Gretel mentions how she tried to kill herself after seeing the film. Alex is glad she didn’t die: She should die in jail.

Alex asks Gretel if she feels guilty, and Gretel turns the question back on him. Alex says their behaviors defy comparison. Gretel could have helped many people by telling her story and identifying others. Instead, she put her safety first. Alex threatens to make Gretel infamous, which would taint her son, his wife, and their baby (Gretel found out Eleanor was pregnant the previous night).

Alex admits to hitting his wife and son. He’d do the same with a “dog.” He tells Gretel to direct her look of disgust at herself. Using the Cold War phrase “mutually assured destruction,” he promises not to out her if she’ll leave him alone. Gretel agrees.

Time passes, and Gretel hears Alex hit Madelyn again. In the garden, Henry says Alex caught him reading when he was supposed to do his homework. Gretel brings up book burning and asks Henry if Alex hits him regularly. Henry nods.

Gretel wonders what would make Alex stop. She presumes he used his status to convince the police nothing was going on. Alex reminds Gretel of the predatory men she reads about in newspapers. People look the other way until they kill their kids and wives.

Madelyn appears and tells Henry to come inside. Henry doesn’t want to, but he obeys when Madelyn screams at him. Gretel tells Madelyn that Alex will kill her. Madelyn hopes Alex will do it tomorrow.

Inside the building, Alex threatens to expose Gretel. He imagines the media attention she’ll receive. Gretel promises to stay away. She understands Madelyn’s wish to die.

After Gretel tells David everything, David questions her humanity. Gretel says she was “born into” her situation and was only 12. David claims that’s old enough to know right and wrong. By doing nothing, she did everything. Gretel reaffirms her love for David, but she disgusts David. He thinks she’s as horrible as “all of them” (446). He tells her to “burn in hell” and then leaves (446).

Edgar and Gretel exchange letters, and Edgar tells her David moved to North America, and Gretel tells Edgar her story. Edgar wants to hate Gretel, but he can’t, and he doesn’t think she’s responsible for “the crimes.” He also doesn’t care that she’s pregnant, but Gretel doesn’t keep the baby. She names her Heidi, and then a couple, the Hargraves, adopt her.

The night before Caden and Eleanor marry, Gretel invites Alex to her flat. She offers Alex a beer and encourages politeness. She calls him charming.

Alex says he’s a product of his father, just like Gretel. Gretel says she can’t change who her father is, but Alex doesn’t have to be like his father.

Alex thinks Madelyn belongs to him. He doesn’t want anyone to have “access” to her. He’s not sexist: He knows smart women, and he could listen to them speak, but Madelyn isn’t smart. As for Henry, he’ll become strong, unlike Gretel’s son, who’s “overweight” and “unhealthy.”

Gretel says her father is a “monster” and that his mother should have drowned him. Gretel wouldn’t be alive, but millions of others would. Alex thinks Gretel is distorting her father’s role. The Holocaust didn’t start because of him.

Gretel tells Alex that it’s her birthday. She doesn’t think Alex will change. He’ll continue to be abusive until Madelyn kills herself, and then he’ll feign grief and send Henry to a boarding school where bullies will terrorize him.

Gretel tells Alex about meeting Shmuel and finding her brother’s clothes by the fence. She blames herself for her brother’s death. As she goes into the kitchen to get a box cutter, she tells Alex she hasn’t saved anyone, and maybe she can’t save Madelyn, but she wants to save Henry. Standing behind his chair, she reminds Alex that he told her she should die in jail.

The wedding is at a registry office, and the only guests besides Gretel are Eleanor’s parents and a cousin who works as a dog groomer. Eleanor asks for an update on Alex, and Gretel doesn’t tell her that she slit his throat with a box cutter and pulled his body into the spare room—instead, she tells Eleanor she used “persuasion” to make him stop.

At home, Gretel runs into Oberon. He’s not moving to Australia—his employers won’t help with the cost of relocation. She tells him Heidi’s flat will be his in no time. Oberon hopes that isn’t true.

The newspapers present Gretel as an innocuous older person who went “doolally.” Her lawyer tells her to go along with the story, but Gretel refuses. She wants people to know that she planned it. Nonetheless, the judge puts her in a low-security prison that Gretel compares to a “retirement village.” Caden and Eleanor visit her, as do Heidi and Oberon. She’s not sorry for Alex’s death, but she’s sorry for “the rest of it” (471).

In jail, she has her antique Seugnot jewelry box that she hasn’t opened since 1946. Inside is a picture of her family. In jail, she can look at the photo and say her brother’s name: Bruno.

John Boyne says he came up with the idea for All the Broken Places in 2004 after writing The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. For years, he made notes about Gretel, but he didn’t plan to write the book until he was in his eighties or nineties. The COVID-19 pandemic changed that.

Boyne says the novel is about grief, guilt, and complicity. He says the Holocaust has intrigued him ever since he read Elie Wiesel’s account of surviving Auschwitz, Night (1956). He’s read many other books and seen countless movies about the topic. The purpose of Boyne’s book isn’t education, but investigating human emotions and experiences.

With Gretel, Boyne isn’t trying to make a sympathetic character. Like other humans, she can be kind and cruel. He encourages the reader to think about how it’s easier to judge someone’s behavior from far away and claim that they would have resisted if they were in her situation.