"Once," by Morris Gleitzman
Once is a children's novel about a young Jewish boy named Felix who is growing up in a Catholic orphanage in Germany. The novel is set during the 1930s at the time of the Holocaust and Felix is the only child in this orphanage who's parents aren't actually dead, or at least he hopes, which leads him to set out on this journey to find them.
Once is a beautiful and impactful story where you feel as though you're being stripped of your rose tinted blindfold, just as Felix is when he encounters the dreadful horrors that take place outside the four walls of the orphanage.
I still remember the first chapter of the book being so sweet and full of innocent and amusing moments. The story starts with Felix finding a whole carrot in his soup which has never happened to anyone before, not even the nuns get a whole carrot. The children are told that if they find a dead fly in their food they should be grateful because that's how bad the conditions are in this orphanage. Felix is known for his notoriously wild and creative imagination which leads him to assume that the carrot was sent from his parents to let him know that they're coming for him. It just shows that during a time of such horrors, these innocent and naïve children still found something to latch onto, something that gave them hope, even something as insignificant to us as a carrot, to guide them through this living nightmare.
What made this story so heart breaking was how Felix always tried to find the best in people, even when a Nazi soldier pointed a gun at him, he assumed they did it to excite him. When the bullet just missed his head he dropped to the ground out of fear, but even then he thought he was shot by accident since the soldier drove over a road bump. It doesn't end here either, he started to feel guilty because he thought he led this soldier to believe that he had taken a life and how he wouldn't be able to live with that, so Felix jumped out of the grass to tell the Nazi soldier that he was okay, he's not dead.
You really get to see how the circumstances Felix was put through forced him to mature within this story over the span of just a few weeks, until he finally reached the point where even he couldn't justify these horrific actions anymore. It's truly heart breaking. He even saves a young girl named Zelda from a burning house and becomes a brother figure for her. Zelda is adorable! I absolutely love her so much and she needs to be protected at all costs! She even has this really cute and snarky catch phrase she'd say at the end of each sentence, 'don't you know anything?!'.
There are more books in this series called Then, Now, After and Soon. I'm definitely planning on reading them because I need to know if Felix and Zelda are okay! But I'm also too scared to continue because I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to them!
I'd give this book a 5/5!
