All the Broken Places

“A single word—collaborator—now incited the same levels of terror in the populace as another—aristocrat—had done a century and a half earlier.”

Gretel juxtaposes “collaborator” with “aristocrat,” connecting the French Revolution with her situation. Like the wealthy and the royalty during the Revolution, Gretel is a target in 1946 France.

“I had my reasons.”

Caden asks why Gretel pushed Edgar to buy a flat in Winterville Court, and Gretel’s response gives the reader a clue that Heidi is her daughter. Her “reasons” relate to being near her first child, who has lived in the building since the Hargraves adopted her as an infant.

“My father was unkind to her, you see. His father was unkind to his mother too, and his to his, and so on. It’s generational, don’t you think?”

Madelyn emphasizes the theme of Breaking Cycles of Harm. She doesn’t think it’s possible: People inevitably follow in their parents’ footsteps. Gretel disagrees with her, foreshadowing her action later in the novel.

“I can’t have his name spoken.”

Gretel’s mother can’t confront the traumatic past, and neither can Gretel. They can’t say her brother’s name. By not saying his name, Gretel continues the harmful pattern of keeping secrets and evading guilt.

“‘Rémy would hardly take us somewhere that held any danger, would you, darling?’ ‘I would sooner sacrifice a limb.’”

Rémy’s response is a red herring. He’s misleading Gretel and her mother: He will indeed take them to a dangerous place, the warehouse where Gretel’s and Nathalie’s heads are brutally shaved.

“My right arm instinctively covered the place on my left where a tattoo would have been, had one been scarred into me.”

The man fixing Heidi’s oven at first mistakes Gretel for a survivor of the concentration camps. As Gretel wasn’t an inmate, she doesn’t have a tattoo, but her guilt is evident in this moment. It’s as if Gretel would rather be a Holocaust survivor than the daughter of a top Nazi.

“‘You are—,’ said M. Toussaint, pointing an accusatory finger at her and using her real name. ‘Your husband was the devil of—.’ And here he named that other place where we had lived after Berlin. ‘And you are Gretel,’ he continued. ‘The devil’s daughter.’”

Toussaint uses hyperbolic diction to highlight the horridness of Nazism. To him, Nathalie’s husband and Gretel’s father isn’t just a bad person or an evil person; he’s not a person at all but rather the devil.

“For someone who thinks she has no skills in the acting department, you, my dear, have the one thing that every actress needs above all others [….] The ability to lie.”

As Gretel pretends to be unaware of the yelling and violence happening in the flat below, Alex drops a hint that he knows Gretel is hiding something from the world. Like a performer, she’s acting like someone else.

“It was with the use of this phrase—‘little man’—that I felt my stomach clench and held on to the counter to steady myself.”

Through diction, Gretel realizes that the mysterious man at the bar is likely Kurt Kotler. Even after putting 10,000 miles between herself and Europe, she is unable to escape her fast. Confronted with a visceral reminder of it, she becomes physically ill.

“But there’s something under the skin, something that frightens me a little. And if you know me at all by now, Gretel, you’ll know that I don’t frighten easily. But that fella? He’s no good.”

As the past doesn’t go away, Cait can detect Kurt’s history. Cait, a tall bartender who is not easily intimidated by men, uses repetition—she repeats the word “frightened”—to emphasize Kurt’s scary undertones.

“I believe you’ve kidnapped my son.”

After Gretel picks Henry up from school and looks after him in her flat, Alex arrives and tells her she’s kidnapped his son. The quote is tragically ironic. Gretel hasn’t kidnapped Henry, but Alex has imprisoned his son in a dangerous situation.

“I’ve seen all those movies, of course. Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Sophie’s Choice. And I’ve watched a few documentaries and read a few books. But you don’t really get a sense of it until you’re actually there, do you?”

Eleanor names a trio of well-known, real-life movies about the Holocaust and references unnamed documentaries and books. Her quote alludes to the myriad of cultural products about the Holocaust. Some scholars, like the French-Algerian activist and author Houria Bouteldja, argue that the Holocaust invariably fascinates Westerners because the victims (the Jews) were white Westerners.

“He’s kind, Mrs. F. And he’s funny. And he’s interested in me. He asks questions about my life and he listens when I answer. He’s not just asking for the sake of it.”

Eleanor redeems Oberon by listing his positive traits. Before her dialogue with Gretel, Oberon is depicted as being rather predatory and ungainly. Eleanor reveals that Oberon has flaws but is not a bad guy.

“It’s always felt to me like a symbol of that time. One that any of us who were there, on either side, would remember.”

Kurt drew a fence on the newspaper because he thinks of it as a symbol. There are two sides to the fence, representing the victims and the perpetrators. Yet Bruno’s death exposes the malleability of the symbol. His drawing is also a signal to Gretel that he’s aware that she’s been following and watching him.

“I glanced down at the table and watched as my hand moved toward them. The Führer’s glasses.”

Kurt keeps Hitler’s glasses, which references the commodification of Nazi items. In real life, people buy and sell things belonging to Nazis. At a 2011 auction in Munich, someone could’ve bought Hitler’s reading glasses.

“Nonsense. No one would let a child your age die.”

Gretel’s diction indicates that she doesn’t understand that genocide is occurring. She thinks Shmuel is being ridiculous, innocently believing that people don’t let kids die. This utterance lends credibility to Gretel’s later claims that she was not aware of and did not understand what exactly people like her father or Kurt were doing.

“Do you know what I can’t fucking stand? It’s women who won’t shut the fuck up. And you won’t shut the fuck up.”

Alex reveals his predatory character through his actions and diction. He repeats “fuck” three times while speaking to Gretel. His vulgar repetitions and misogynistic insinuations highlight his place in the narrative as a vulgar character.

“But before he left me, he leaned over and whispered in my ear. It had been many, many decades since I had last heard something so chilling.”

Henry tells Gretel what Alex will do if he finds out he or Madelyn has told on him for abusing them, and Gretel connects Alex’s “chilling” threat to her Nazi past. Arguably, she connects the subjective violence of Alex to the objective violence of the Nazis.

“Then, as if from nowhere, I heard a low keening sound, like an animal caught in a trap. It was horrifying, inhuman, a sound that no living human should ever make.”

The shock of seeing herself and her family in the documentary alienates Gretel from herself: She doesn’t realize she’s making the sound—it’s as if she’s another person. As Nathalie made an inhuman sound when the French people shaved her and Gretel’s head, the sound connects Gretel to her mother.

“I just wanted to check you got my gift. I thought it might bring back some happy memories for you.”

Alex continues to advance his predatory character through his cruelly ironic diction. The book featuring her father’s photo isn’t a “gift” but a threat. It’s not supposed to elicit “happy memories” but to disquiet her. With his words and actions, Alex is deceptive.

“I loved him very much when I was a girl. He’s been gone for eight years now but…I can’t help it, there are times that I still miss him. I know what he did, how he lived…but he loved me very much, David. I can’t explain it.”

Gretel struggles to articulate her love for her father, and the ellipses reinforce her difficulty. Her feelings arguably circle back to objective violence versus subjective violence. She’s painfully aware her father played a central role in the Holocaust, but he didn’t hurt her, and she never saw him personally hurt anyone else.

“‘Because, by rights, you should die in a prison cell.’ I thought about it. I could not dispute it. ‘I’m aware of that.’”

Alex thinks Gretel should die in jail, and Gretel doesn’t disagree, but in reality, the Allies wouldn’t put Gretel in jail, as they didn’t go after children of top Nazis. At the same time, the dialogue is ironic. The twist: Gretel will die in jail—not for her Nazi father’s actions, but because she kills Alex.

“The Holocaust didn’t begin and end with your father. Don’t overestimate his influence.”

Alex’s point links to Hannah Arendt’s observations about Nazi totalitarianism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she describes a fluid system that can adapt and replace people. If Gretel's father wasn’t the commander of Auschwitz, someone else would’ve been. If Gretel’s grandmother had killed her son, it wouldn’t have made a difference: The Holocaust still would’ve occurred.