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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
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.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
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 license. 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.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized 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.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
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Orthodox Jewish groups have been quiet about ICE. This Minneapolis rabbi wasn’t.
When the heads of major Jewish denominations co-signed a letter last week criticizing “in the strongest possible terms” the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis, Orthodox Judaism was conspicuously absent. Neither the Orthodox Union nor Agudath Israel of America — the two leading Orthodox umbrella organizations — has commented on the mass deployment of ICE and Border Patrol officers to the city.
There’s a reason Orthodox leaders might be choosing their words carefully — condemning ICE would put them at odds with not only a sizable chunk of their membership. Unlike members of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, Orthodox Jews — who represent about a tenth of the American Jewish population — lean heavily conservative, with about three-quarters supporting President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. (The Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel did not respond to separate inquiries.)
There was, however, at least one Orthodox rabbi willing to criticize ICE in public. Rabbi Max Davis, who leads the Minneapolis synagogue Darchei Noam Congregation, was one of 49 Jewish leaders to sign a Jan. 16 letter from the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, which said ICE was “wreaking havoc across our state” and which resolved to “bear witness and make a difference.”
I called Davis to learn more about why he signed and what he’s seeing on the ground. He also spoke about congregants who have been pepper sprayed or arrested at protests, how he approaches politics at the pulpit of an Orthodox shul, why he rejects the Holocaust comparisons some are making and how he’s tried to make a difference.
The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
The Forward: Why did you sign this letter?
Rabbi Max Davis: It felt like a very reasonable, very carefully thought out response to the present situation. I know that there are many within the shul who are looking for some leadership in this moment, and signing was a drop in the bucket compared to what some people are doing.
By the same token, I know that there are other perspectives within my own shul and certainly within the broader Orthodox community, and I strongly believe that it’s not the role of a rabbi to police his congregants’ politics. In our shul, we learn from and respect each other, and there’s an incredible amount of wisdom and life experience beyond my own. So I signed with caution, but with quite a feeling of disappointment and anger in the events unfolding downtown, and the loss of life in particular.
I’m probably the only Orthodox rabbi in the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, and there have been statements issued that I have not signed. But this one was an opportunity I was not going to miss.
What’s been the reaction at Darchei Noam to your signing the letter?
I got several yasher koachs (plaudits) privately. Those who may disagree, I think were and are being polite. There’s definitely been some pushback about politics entering our shul. But I haven’t heard much about the letter specifically. I don’t think anyone was terribly surprised that I signed it.
More broadly, what are things like in your community right now?
Within our kehilla (congregation), there’s a diversity of opinion. But mostly what I’m hearing is deep sorrow and frustration and anger and pain — particularly from those who watch the videos, who are acquainted with individuals suffering directly from the ongoing operations, or who have watched what the operations have been doing to our city and to our community.
Have you seen what’s happening firsthand?
There’s someone in our extended community who just got out of jail and called me about 10 minutes ago to give me a heads up. We have a couple of people in the community who have been pepper sprayed. We have people in the community who have been very active in supply drives and driving children to school because their parents are afraid to come out.
Instead of buying stuff at the sort of generic supermarket I thought I might as well make the money count where people are hurting the most. So I went a couple weeks ago to try and pick up some kiddush supplies down at one of the large Latino markets that I know has taken quite a hit. I was pretty much the only customer. It was a very sad place.
So in those regards, I’ve seen what’s going on. I was down at the march last Erev Shabbos (Jan. 16). It was minus-10 degrees. There were 50,000 people out there in the streets and thousands more in the skyways and in the buildings that we could see. You see banners and signs hanging onto highways. You see people clustered at intersections with signs and upside-down American flags. There’s a tremendous amount of anger out there.
What’s it like to be living through that?
It’s heartening and it’s disheartening. It’s disheartening that it feels necessary; it’s heartening to see community coming together. It’s disheartening to see signs comparing the federal government and ICE to Nazi Germany; I find that, as a Jew, deeply offensive and ignorant. And by the same token, I find all of the messages around community and common decency to be a beautiful sight.
It’s not to say that I have any solutions to the more fundamental politics. I’m not saying that the country doesn’t have an immigration problem. But I do know that you can’t watch the video of Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse from the VA hospital, you can’t watch the video of Renee Good in her car and how that unfolded — shootings on streets and in neighborhoods that I know — you can’t watch that and not be highly disturbed and moved.
Have you addressed this moment at all from the pulpit?
I have definitely mentioned it in a couple of drashos (sermons). A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about ignoring the broader humanity and the plight of our neighbors at our own moral peril. Nechama Leibowitz sees a progression in Moshe’s interventions, first on behalf of another Jew against the Egyptian, then for a Jew against another Jew, and finally, with the daughters of Yitro at the well, between two non-Jewish parties. It was a good base for talking about doing what we can, when we can, to be an ohr l’goyim (a light unto the nations). I don’t think I said the word “ICE,” but there was no mistake about the subject matter — I think Renee Good had been shot like two days earlier.
With drashos, I’ve tried to be a little bit more tempered and restrained, because I think a lot of people come to hear Torah and inspiration and political issues are risky business. I’m also careful because I don’t want to ruin people’s Shabbos in other ways. Everyone has so much of this all week long, and I know some people look forward to Shabbos just to take a break. I’ve been told by some people that I’ve been too pareve, and by others that it’s been too much. So maybe I’m succeeding or failing everybody at the same time.
You mentioned the Nazi comparisons. Why do you take offense to those in this context?
That was industrialized murder, and concentration camps — there’s not a word to describe the evil of what that was. That was just exponentially more horrific. And it disturbs me to no end — although I am not surprised to see people make this comparison and I get where they’re coming from — how lightly the Holocaust and the evils of Nazi Germany seem to be treated when people want to trot out a paradigm of evil.
Why did it feel important to you to patronize the Latino grocery store?
I feel for these communities, where these are honest, legitimate, hard working businesses, and they watch their customer base all but dry up — that includes people who are here legally, employees who are here legally. But there are so many stories of individuals who are being racially profiled or being picked up by mistake.
I was very angry about the story of a Laotian man who, in front of his family and children, was pulled out of the shower into 10-degree weather and bundled off into an ICE vehicle and driven around for an hour before they figured out that he was here legally and had no criminal record. He was let go without so much as an apology. He’s got a wife and small children — and I’ve got a wife and kids, you know? This kind of thing is absolutely unacceptable. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that was such an outlier case. And that’s not an America that I believe in.
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Stories of ghosts, grief and Shabbat gladness win top prizes in Jewish children’s literature
(JTA) — Anna is a misunderstood sixth-grade girl who communicates with the ghosts of her Jewish ancestors. Teased by her classmates and worried-over by her family, she finds comfort and understanding with her Bubbe and her beloved Jewish traditions.
“Neshama,” Marcella Pixley’s lyrically written novel-in-verse, won the gold medal for Jewish children’s literature for middle-grade readers from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Its Sydney Taylor Book Awards were announced today in a virtual livecast from Chicago.
The award committee called Pixley’s “a lyrical, deeply Jewish story about identity, grief, and resilience.”
The annual award, named in memory of Sydney Taylor, the author of the “All-of-a-Kind Family” series, “recognizes books for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience,” according to the award committee’s announcement.
Other winners include “D.J. Rosenblum Becomes the G.O.A.T,” a coming-of-age mystery by Abby White, which won in the young adult category, and “Shabbat Shalom: Let’s Rest and Reset,” a lively board book written and illustrated by Suzy Ultman, which won the picture book award.
The Sydney Taylor committee named Uri Shulevitz, whose 2008 book “How I Learned Geography” drew on his boyhood experiences fleeing Poland after the Nazi invasion in 1939, as the winner of its Body-of-Work award. Shulevitz, a multi-award winning storyteller and illustrator, died last year.
In addition to the top winners, the Sydney Taylor committee named five silver medalists and nine notable titles of Jewish content.
“This year’s winners and honorees exemplify excellence in Jewish children’s literature through vibrant storytelling and rich perspectives that foster empathy, understanding, and a deep appreciation for culture and community,” said Melanie Koss, chair of the award committee.
Winners will receive their awards in June in Evanston, Illinois at the AJL’s annual conference.
In “D. J. Rosenblum Becomes the “G.O.A.T,” an about-to-be bat mitzah-age girl is determined to prove that her beloved cousin did not die by suicide. Abby White lightens the emotional subject with a teen’s authentic, humorous voice.
“She wrestles with her Torah portion and faith, finding strength to face loss and begin moving forward,” the committee noted.
“Shabbat Shalom” may be the first board book to garner the award, Heidi Rabinowitz, a long-time podcaster about Jewish children’s books, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The sophisticated board book combines succinct text with playful art,” the committee wrote in its release.
In awarding its Body-of-Work award to Shulevitz (1935-2025), who lived with his family in Israel before settling in New York, the committee recognized him as a “foundational voice in Jewish children’s literature.” His books “illuminate Jewish culture and reflect universal experience,” the committee wrote.
Many of Shulevitz’s titles reflect his Jewish roots, including “The Golem,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer and “The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela,” an illustrated travelogue for children based on the real-life voyages of the 12th-century Jewish traveler who visited Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad and Jerusalem. Shulevitz garnered the Caldecott medal, children’s literature’s top honor for illustrated books, for “The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship.”
Earlier, the AJL announced that Jessica Russak-Hoffman, a journalist for Jewish media outlets, won the organization’s new manuscript award for “How to Catch a Mermaid (When You’re Scared of the Sea),” a novel set in Israel for ages 8-13.
Last week, the AJL named Jason Diamond as the 2026 winner of its Jewish Fiction award for his novel, “Kaplan’s Plot.”
At Tuesday’s event, the Youth Media Awards hosted by the American Library Association, the winners were also announced for the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newberry and Printz awards, among others. The Asian American Picture Book award went to “Many Things All At Once,” by Veera Hiranandani and illustrated by Nadia Alam, the story of a girl with a Jewish mother and a South Asian father.
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NJ church deletes video of pageant featuring antisemitic character but says critics took it ‘out of context’
(JTA) — A New Jersey church says it is “committed to engaging in dialogue, and teaching others about our heritage” after putting on a Christmas pageant that drew criticism for reflecting antisemitic stereotypes.
St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s pageant, known as a vertep, featured an antagonist named Moshko who danced with the devil while wearing faux Hasidic garb like side locks and a black hat. The character was referred to as “zhyd,” a Ukrainian slur for “Jew.”
“We do not have any intention to promote harm or hatred with this pageant,” the church said in a statement issued on Facebook on Friday night. “However, we recognize some outside of our culture may assign elements of the performance to stereotypes when taken out of context which is inclusive of peoples historically present in eastern Europe.”
The church did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment prior to an initial report on the vertep earlier this month. It did not respond to an additional request for comment on Monday, following the statement. The church removed photos and video of the pageant from its Facebook page following the JTA report.
The vertep is a centuries-old Slavic Christmas tradition that emerged from puppet theater. In recent years, many Ukrainian Orthodox churches have removed material criticized as offensive. Since the current war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2022, one popular replacement for the Jewish antagonist has been a Russian character.
In its statement, St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church emphasized that “the event does not target any specific group” but indicated that it could make changes in future pageants.
“The church is reflecting on this matter seriously and is committed to engaging in dialogue, and teaching others about our heritage while ensuring that future events continue to uphold the dignity, respect, and safety of all people,” it said.
The Anti-Defamation League of New Jersey, which said earlier this month that it was reaching out to St. Mary Protectress, told JTA on Monday that it had not been able to communicate with anyone from the church.
The church’s apology rang hollow for Lev Golinkin, a Jewish writer born in Ukraine who has advocated against the antisemitic elements of the traditional vertep.
“It’s not an apology, it’s more of an insult,” Golinkin said. “The problem is not the context. The problem is exactly that. It is in context perfectly.”
He added, “They’re making it seem that the people who are criticizing them … are the ones who have a problem because they don’t understand the culture.”
St. Mary Protectress is not the only Ukrainian church in the United States to import the antisemitic elements of the vertep from the old country. A church in Connecticut erected a backdrop poster for its pageant this year that included a Moshko character standing next to the devil.
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