Age 9+

Making fiction about the Holocaust is always problematic. Authors who exploit the event primarily to invest their work with importance are beneath contempt. Yet, occasionally, solutions to the challenging question of how a children’s book might be produced on this subject do add to the empathy of a new generation without being a travesty. Morris Gleitzman acknowledges in Once that it is an attempt “to imagine the unimaginable”. Conflating events, and eschewing scrupulous realism, he then uses a device that he has already handled expertly in his other books: an innocent narrator who does not grasp what is happening around him. This ironic device depends on the reader’s prior understanding, so the book will work best for children who know about the Holocaust. The hero, a Jewish boy in a Catholic orphanage, tells himself reassuring stories as he misinterprets events, but gradually comes to comprehend terrible truths, and uses his stories to protect other children in the care of a Polish dentist in the Warsaw ghetto. He reaches the point where no stories are enough. It is a painfully truthful progression.

ONCE by Morris Gleitzman

(Puffin £5.99)

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