All the Broken Places

by John Boyne

How can there be such a collective lack of conscience?”

those of us who were children during the 1940s will spend our lives coming to terms with the trauma of so much bloodshed. We all lost someone, didn’t we? We were confronted with grief at an early age. And guilt.”

Guilt was what kept you awake in the middle of the night or, if you managed to sleep, poisoned your dreams. Guilt intruded upon any happy moment, whispering in your ear that you had no right to pleasure. Guilt followed you down streets, interrupting the most mundane moments with remembrances of days and hours when you could have done something to prevent tragedy but chose to do nothing.

It was an extraordinary way to refer to six years of war, countless millions of deaths, and all the broken places that had been left behind.

“Why would anyone burn a book?” “Bad people,” I told him. “All long since dead. Well, most of them anyway. They were afraid of them, you see. Frightened of ideas. Frightened of the truth. People still are, I find. Things don’t change that much.”