Once...

"Once upon a time" is how children's stories usually start, and you expect princesses and castles and fairy godmothers. Not so in this compelling, somber story about young Felix in Nazi-occupied Poland. The story opens with Felix, a Jewish boy, day-dreaming about escaping the orphanage where his parents, former bookstore-owners, have placed him to keep him safe while the Nazis go about their exterminating. Felix, being young and full of ideas and an overactive imagination, expects his parents to show up any minute. But they don't, so he must go look for them and tell them about the Nazis. Only when he escapes and sees the atrocities caused at the hands of German soldiers does reality slowly begin to sink in.

Felix--probably because he's grown up reading, and/or being read to, is a gifted storyteller, and it's his stories that keep him and others alive, or at least hopeful. But gradually, Felix must come to terms with the horrible realities surrounding him and reconcile fact and fiction. At one point, when Felix returns to his family's abandoned, ransacked house, he's told: "They're all gone...your parents, all of them." Felix thinks, I want him to stop. I want him to tell me it's just a story.

The Holocaust--and the murder of 1.5 million children--is not "just a story." It's a very real part of our history, one we can never forget. I'm thankful to the author for telling the childrens' stories, and keeping the history alive. This book had me boo-hooing by the end. Add it to your Holocaust YAL collection, and/or use it in a human rights unit to consider the modern-day genocides occuring in Rwanda and the Sudan. Would make a good pair with Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Book Thief.