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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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6 Jewish takeaways from the midterm elections
(JTA) — The sheer size and geographic scope of the Republican wipeout Tuesday makes it hard to read anything definitive into the results beyond a nationwide repudiation of President Donald Trump (and his candidate selections). But whether or not any other factors were at play in the GOP bloodbath, the fallout will have a range of reverberations. Here are 6 takeaways that point to what comes next.
1. A significantly weakened Donald Trump doesn’t bode well for Netanyahu
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has been a longshot bet that keeps on paying off. It’s hard to overstate how significant Trump’s improbable wins in 2016 and 2024 were in bolstering Netanyahu’s domestic standing and giving him space to advance his regional agenda. Trump also served as a security blanket, leaving Netanyahu and his allies with a sense for many years that they need not worry too much about skyrocketing Democratic and international anger with Israel.
In fact, there was even a hope in Bibi world that The Donald’s support could save Netanyahu from political defeat at home (and, to be fair, his 11th-hour endorsement may have). Whether Netanyahu holds on or chief rival Gadi Eisenkot succeeds in replacing him, Israel is entering uncharted territory. There is little chance that the combination of a weakened Trump and an emboldened Democratic Congress produces similar levels of support for aggressive action against Iran and its proxies, and other policies that a wide spectrum of Israelis see as crucial to their security.
2. Jeffries and Schumer have a massive headache coming their way
With Tuesday night’s Democratic wave, Hakeem Jeffries is on track to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and Chuck Schumer will likely get a second shot as U.S. Senate Majority Leader. These New Yorkers have longstanding ties to the pro-Israel community and are among their party’s strongest Israel supporters – putting them at odds with the growing number of congressional Democrats who want their party to take a much harder line against Israel. It won’t be long before members in each caucus are demanding concrete action, including meaningful limits on U.S. military sales.
Both Democratic leaders have ratcheted up their criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government in the wake of its war on Hamas in Gaza, but they have ultimately voted against various legislative attempts to punish Israel. This past April, Schumer was one of only seven Senate Democrats to vote against a pair of resolutions that together would have blocked the sale of D-9 bulldozers, widely used in military operations, and 1,000-pound bombs to Israel. In July, Jeffries voted against ending U.S. military aid to Israel, but the measure was supported by almost half of the Democratic caucus. As leaders of their respective chambers, Jeffries and Schumer will likely face immense pressure for more such votes and face much tougher scrutiny from the party base over continued support for Israel.
3. The impact of the anti-Israel vote was diluted
On the other hand, the massive Democratic victory dilutes the power of the anti-Israel lawmakers in Congress. Their numbers will grow, causing problems for party leaders trying to keep anti-Israel measures off the agenda. But they will remain a relatively small subset within a much larger Democratic majority that includes many moderates and Israel supporters.
Not only will anti-Israel members have less ability to hold Congress hostage, the overall issue of Israel loses some of its potency when the broader political winds indicate that all Democrats were boosted.
4. John Fetterman just lost his juice
Just as the sizable Democratic House majority makes Jeffries less dependent on anti-Israel lawmakers in his caucus, the next Senate Majority Leader won’t need to rely on Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. For years, Fetterman has been driving fellow Democrats crazy with his cozying up to Republicans, with progressives especially upset over his die-hard support for Israel. Fetterman has even said that the one thing that could cause him to leave the Democratic Senate caucus would be his party turning decisively against Israel.
Had things broken differently, with Democrats grabbing a narrow 51-49 majority in the chamber, Fetterman’s influence would have been hypercharged. Now, not so much. The Democrats no longer need him to keep control of the chamber. So Schumer, should he regain the majority leader role, will have to worry much less about keeping the party’s top pro-Israel cheerleader happy. In 2028, he’ll be up for reelection and highly unlikely to survive the Democratic primary.
5. AIPAC has not found a formula for success
A few years back, the leading pro-Israel lobby decided the best way to counter the initial anti-Israel rumblings in Congress was to jump deep into the campaign fundraising business. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, the number of Israel critics in Congress – especially on the Democratic side of the aisle – has grown, with a fresh batch on the way. Moreover, in many races, anti-Israel candidates and AIPAC critics managed to turn the lobby’s backing into a liability.
Meanwhile, Trump’s seemingly impromptu announcement Tuesday that his administration would end aid to Israel after this year suggests that Republican backing for such support is dropping alongside Democrats’. And Tuesday’s results suggest AIPAC’s strong support for the U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran is out of step with the American public and many incoming lawmakers.
All of this indicates that AIPAC has yet to figure out how to manage the anti-Israel turn sweeping through American politics.
6. It was a great night for Jewish presidential hopefuls
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff says he isn’t running for president in 2028. But that won’t stop the speculation from skyrocketing after his impressive reelection in Georgia – Georgia?! – with nearly 60% of the vote. More importantly, he probably just grabbed frontrunner status in the race to become America’s first Jewish president. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro also registered a similarly sized reelection victory in a state that Trump won just two years ago, but Ossoff – a fierce Trump antagonist and, increasingly, a critic of Israel’s military actions – cemented his rock star status among Democrats this cycle and has demonstrated an ability to bridge the gap between younger progressives and more traditional liberals.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also cruised to reelection. Meanwhile in Michigan, moderate Elissa Slotkin – another senator and likely presidential hopeful (of course, which senator isn’t a presidential hopeful?) – may have at least propped open the door to some progressive support by campaigning hard for Abdul El-Sayed. All four have been highly critical of Netanyahu, with both Ossoff and Slotkin joining most of their fellow Democratic senators in voting in April for a curb on various weapons sales. Both senators have declined to label Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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El-Sayed declares victory in Michigan Senate race that left many Jews uneasy
(JTA) — DETROIT – Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has declared victory in the hotly contested race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, capping a campaign that has prompted deep anxieties among Jews in the state and beyond.
With 88% of the ballots counted at around 2:27 a.m. ET, The Associated Press called the race for El-Sayed, who had 52% of the vote compared with 46% for his Republican rival, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers.”
In his acceptance speech, El-Sayed thanked supporters whom he said had welcomed him into “your homes, your churches, your synagogues.”
He also referenced his ardently pro-Palestinian views, saying, “They try to call you hateful if you believe that Palestinian kids should get to grow up in the land of their forefathers without being martyred by our tax dollars… We don’t want our money to be sent to do apartheid or genocidal war.”
During his victory speech, chants of “Free Palestine” were heard throughout the crowd. Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia University activist who was detained by the Trump administration, was in attendance.
The race had been viewed as crucial to Democrats’ hopes of retaking the chamber. But for many of Michigan’s estimated 105,000 Jewish voters, the campaign was defined instead by El-Sayed’s tumultuous relationship to the community.
That animosity extended beyond the Democrat’s fierce criticism of Israel to encompass his statements about attacks targeting the state’s Jewish community and his early campaigning with streamer Hasan Piker, who has made several controversial comments about Jewish voters.
His uncompromising stances on Israel have also made him a target among pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC, which has spent heavily against him in both the primary and general election. AIPAC’s rare entry into a general election race was in support of Rogers.
One of El-Sayed’s positions on Israel — to end all U.S. military aid — was once thought a far-left pipe dream. But that has changed. On Election Day morning, Trump announced that, under his watch, nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel would wind down by the end of the year. Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in agreement with the need to end aid and deny Democratic critics a point of attack.
El-Sayed’s campaign has galvanized young voters and a range of other constituencies, and he pulled ahead in the polls in the race’s final stretch. But his questioning of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and whether it or Iran posed a greater threat to the United States, as well as his prior associations with figures such as Hasan Piker, the streamer who has spread extreme rhetoric about American Jews, have sparked concern among Jewish Michiganders.
So, too, did comments the candidate made following the March terror attack on Temple Israel, a major synagogue in the state, in which El-Sayed appeared to link the attack to Israel’s war in Lebanon after reports that the attacker lost family in an Israeli strike. Hostile behavior from some of El-Sayed’s supporters toward pro-Israel Democrats, most prominently on display at the state party’s spring convention, has also alarmed Jews. El-Sayed has pledged to stand up to antisemitism.
Some Jews who had long considered themselves Democrats, including several local Jewish leaders, have cited such controversies in pledging to vote for Rogers. In some Michigan Jewish neighborhoods, yard signs proclaim that a vote for Rogers is a vote “against antisemitism.”
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Moskowitz wins Florida seat in race between two pro-Israel candidates
(JTA) — Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz beat Republican Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton, in a battle between two staunchly pro-Israel politicians in a redrawn district.
The redrawn district covers a stretch of Florida shoreline north of Miami and includes large Jewish communities in areas including Boca and Fort Lauderdale, and is seen as leaning slightly Democratic.
Moskowitz, who was endorsed by the lobbying group AIPAC, has touted himself as “the most pro-Israel Jewish Democrat in Congress.” Singer, meanwhile, was endorsed by President Donald Trump and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Moskowitz has said there is an “ostracizing” associated with being staunchly pro-Israel in a Democratic Party that is increasingly including anti-Zionist voices. Singer seized on that sentiment, saying during a synagogue candidates’ forum that Moskowitz will be drowned out by the Democrats’ anti-Israel wing if he is reelected.
The candidates themselves have largely been aligned on the issue of Israel. Both have condemned accusations that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. They each oppose any effort to condition or cut off U.S. military aid to Israel. Both supported Israel’s strikes on Iranian facilities in 2025, though Moskowitz has since called for the U.S. to end its war with Iran, whereas Singer said during a forum that the U.S. needs “to ensure victory here.”
Both candidates have also emphasized combating antisemitism in their campaigns, and say they would push to expand the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to increase funding for security at Jewish schools, synagogues and other institutions. They also are both in favor of codifying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism into federal law; critics say the definition wrongly lumps in some criticism of Israel.
In a campaign ad targeting antisemitism, Moskowitz pulled from the story of his family, some of whom — including his great-grandparents — were killed in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
“In every generation, they rise against us,” Moskowitz said in the ad.
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