arts & culture
Irish author John Boyne poses for photographs at the launch of Northern Ireland’s One Book Project in Finaghy, Belfast in 2007. Boyne’s “The Boy in the
Striped Pajamas” has been heavily criticized by Holocaust historians and educators in the years since its release.

Paul Faith - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images
‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,’
Decried for its Holocaust
Inaccuracies, Is Getting a Sequel
BY ANDREW LAPIN
A best-selling children’s novel
that the Auschwitz Memorial
and Museum has said “should
be avoided by anyone who studies
or teaches about the history of the
Holocaust” is getting a sequel.

John Boyne, the Irish author of
“Th e Boy in the Striped Pajamas,”
announced Wednesday that he would
be publishing a follow-up to the 2006
blockbuster about a 9-year-old German
boy’s friendship with a Jewish child
imprisoned at Auschwitz.

Th e new book, he said, would be told
30 from the perspective of the German
boy’s sister, Gretel.

Th e announcement comes just weeks
aft er “Th e Boy in the Striped Pajamas,”
which has sold 11 million copies and
spawned a movie adaptation that
grossed $44 million, faced a fresh round
of scathing criticism over its histor-
ical inaccuracies amid a controversy
over Holocaust education in Tennessee.

Th ere, a local school board removed
“Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning
graphic memoir, from the local curric-
ulum, sparking a national conversation
about how to teach children about the
Holocaust. “Maus” author Art Spiegelman
MARCH 10, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
said he’d be fi ne with students read-
ing another Holocaust book instead
— just not, he said, Boyne’s. “Th e guy
didn’t do any research whatsoever,”
Spiegelman told a Tennessee audience.

Th e new book, “All Th e Broken
Places,” will be published in September
in the United States by Doubleday
and Penguin Random House and in
the United Kingdom by Transworld.

Global rights in more than a dozen
other countries already signed, Boyne
tweeted. Set in the decades between 1946 and
the present day, the book will follow a
91-year-old Gretel, older sister to the
fi rst book’s protagonist Bruno, as she
refl ects on her life “scarred by guilt and
grief” and the ways in which “her com-
plicity dishonoured her life,” according
to the publisher’s release. In the fi rst
book, Gretel and Bruno’s father was
an S.S. commandant, and Bruno even-
tually walked into the extermination
chambers in Auschwitz so he could be
with his Jewish friend Shmuel.

Th e follow-up will be set in Paris,
Sydney and London, and will initially
follow Greta and her mother’s escape
from Poland at the end of the war
“aft er a cataclysmic event which tore
their lives apart,” according to the book
description. Boyne told Th e Bookseller that, since



the publication of the first book, “I’ve
regularly made notes in a file that I
called ’Gretel’s Story.’ It was a book
I hoped to write one day, telling the
story of Bruno’s older sister Gretel who,
at the end of her life, looks back at
the experience she was part of and
is forced to examine her conscience
regarding her guilt and complicity in
those times.”
The first book, which uses the British
“Pyjamas” spelling in its U.K. edi-
tion, was adapted into a 2008 movie
and has proven an enduring inter-
national bestseller and perennial
Holocaust education tool in the United
Kingdom, despite scathing criticism
from Holocaust researchers and other
Holocaust authors. It has been dinged
for inaccuracies including Shmuel’s
continued survival in a camp that
would have gassed him with the other
children upon arrival, and the lack
of youth-centered Nazi propaganda
directed at Bruno, who is depicted as
utterly ignorant of the Jewish genocide
project despite his father’s position as
an Auschwitz guard.

According to British education
observers, the book’s prominence in
classrooms may perpetuate myths and
fallacies about the Holocaust; many
children who read the book believe that
it is based on a true story.

The book has also been criticized
for depicting Bruno’s death, and his
German parents’ grief, as the true trag-
edy at the heart of the story, while
the dead Jews serve largely as window
dressing. For his part, Boyne has defended his
book, which he said was inspired by the
works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel,
from critics. In response to the Auschwitz
museum’s criticisms, he told The Guardian
that because his novel is fiction, it “by its
nature cannot contain inaccuracies, only
anachronisms, and I don’t think there are
any of those in there.”
Boyne is the author of more than a
dozen novels on various subjects, and
more recently came under fire for a
2019 book that contained controversial
depictions of transgender characters. JE
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