All the Broken Places

Fences create boundaries. They mark one area from another, and people are supposed to stick to their side. In Australia, Gretel asks Kurt why he drew a fence on the newspaper, and Kurt replies, “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” (290). In the story, people don’t stick to their side, so fences become a symbol of transgression.

The central transgression occurs when Gretel encourages Bruno to sneak under the fence to help Shmuel find his father. Unaware of the genocide occurring on the other side of the fence, Gretel thinks of it as “a joke. A petty way to get my revenge on him” (338). When Bruno goes under the fence, he breaks the boundary separating Nazi perpetrators from Jewish victims, and he turns into the latter. The malleable fence links to the fluidity of identities. Bruno’s death undercuts the Nazi claim that Jews were inherently different. Bruno blends in with the other Jews: He transgresses Nazi ideology and exposes its flimsy labels. In the context of the fence symbolism, Boyne teaches the reader that mass murder is permeable. Like fences, it allows for transgression. Genocide turns death into the status quo, sweeping up people who are supposed to be safe.

In “Interlude: The Fence (London 1970),” the fence continues to symbolize transgression, as Caden crawls under a fence to explore the construction site behind Winterville Court. Wracked by her traumatic history and guilt about her brother, Gretel overreacts and lashes out, hitting Caden for the first and only time. During this period, she associates breaking the boundary as synonymous with death. Yet Caden isn’t in Auschwitz. His transgression is, more or less, “petty.”