All the Broken Places

by John Boyne

bolthole.

Place where person can escape or hide

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.

Marie Antoinette, who was now scandalizing France with the Diamond Necklace Affair.

peripatetic

Traveling place to place

Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Sophie’s Choice.

invisible stage to most men.

doolally,”

Deranged

choose not to let it control me.”

Eddie Fisher play the London Palladium and, on my birthday, Jo Stafford sing at the Royal Albert Hall.

phrase “my blood ran cold”

good description

Anschluss,

Annexation of austri by germany. 1938

Chamberlain arriving in Munich to meet Hitler and returning with his naïve confidence in “peace for our time,” followed by the invalidation of all passports belonging to Jews and their subsequent reissuing with the letter “J” stamped across them in blood-red ink.

Obersalzberg, the mountaintop location of Hitler’s retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, and we were shown footage from a film shot by Leni Riefenstahl featuring a number of senior figures in the Reich gathered together for a weekend. Hitler himself, of course. Himmler. Goebbels. Heydrich. Eva Braun. A housekeeper passed around glasses of wine while a young boy dressed in the uniform of the Hitlerjugend carried trays of cheese and crackers.

it was here, the narrator told us, that so many conversations regarding the Final Solution took place. Schematics spread across the screen. Diagrams of huts designed to house the inmates. Sketches of the gas chambers. Drawings of the crematoria.

Nazis would release propaganda films intended to show the world that the camps were not places of hardship at all but that the “guests” being housed there were, in fact, treated with great kindness. Children were shown skipping from stone to stone, playing games, while men and women smiled and chatted, coexisting in apparent contentment as they read, enjoyed the sunshine, and socialized.

English subtitles playing below, as he explained how the inmates were given three hot meals a day, access to a library and the finest health care. A football league had even been set up,

“It takes a certain amount of help to get a woman of my years through the day.”

And you might be surprised by how much you’ll miss her when she’s gone.”